[{"id":311638,"date":"2026-09-18T10:05:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311638"},"modified":"2026-09-18T10:05:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:05:23","slug":"a-joyous-love-letter-to-diana-rigg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/a-joyous-love-letter-to-diana-rigg.html","title":{"rendered":"A Joyous Love Letter To Diana Rigg"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiona Sturges at The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"On the stage and screen, Rigg specialised in fierce, complicated women: Medea, Ph\u00e8dre, Mother Courage, the wimple-clad Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Yet in life she refused to take herself or her job seriously. Her fear of appearing earnest led her to decline offers of a biography. Now, six years after her death from cancer, her daughter, the actor Rachael Stirling, has taken on the\u00a0task of documenting Rigg\u2019s life. All About My Mother is a funny, intimate, often joyous and beautifully written eulogy to a woman who didn\u2019t suffer fools yet remained blithely self-mocking and down to earth. Asked what it meant to be made a dame, she replied: \u201cI think it means I\u2019m not supposed to say \u2018fuck\u2019 anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blending memoir and biography, Stirling builds a portrait based on her\u00a0own recollections, plus research into Rigg\u2019s performances, writings, recorded interviews and press cuttings collected and stashed in a trunk by her\u00a0late grandmother Beryl. The book, Stirling says, \u201cis not a detached narrative \u2026 This is what I know, what she said, what I\u2019ve learned, what I want to write, what she wrote and what I think she wouldn\u2019t mind my telling you.\u201d<\/p>\n

more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiona Sturges at The Guardian: On the stage and screen, Rigg specialised in fierce, complicated women: Medea, Ph\u00e8dre, Mother Courage, the wimple-clad Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Yet in life she refused to take herself or her job seriously. Her fear of appearing earnest led her to decline offers of a biography. Now, six…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311638"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311642,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311638\/revisions\/311642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311634,"date":"2026-09-18T08:23:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311634"},"modified":"2026-09-18T08:23:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:23:36","slug":"friday-poem-508","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/friday-poem-508.html","title":{"rendered":"Friday Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kindness<\/h2>\n
\n
\n

Before you know what kindness really is<\/span>
\nyou must lose things,<\/span>
\nfeel the future dissolve in a moment<\/span>
\nlike salt in a weakened broth.<\/span>
\nWhat you held in your hand,<\/span>
\nwhat you counted and carefully saved,<\/span>
\nall this must go so you know<\/span>
\nhow desolate the landscape can be<\/span>
\nbetween the regions of kindness.<\/span>
\nHow you ride and ride<\/span>
\nthinking the bus will never stop,<\/span>
\nthe passengers eating maize and chicken<\/span>
\nwill stare out the window forever.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness<\/span>
\nyou must travel where the Indian in a white poncho<\/span>
\nlies dead by the side of the road.<\/span>
\nYou must see how this could be you,<\/span>
\nhow he too was someone<\/span>
\nwho journeyed through the night with plans<\/span>
\nand the simple breath that kept him alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,<\/span>
\nyou must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.<\/span>
\nYou must wake up with sorrow.<\/span>
\nYou must speak to it till your voice<\/span>
\ncatches the thread of all sorrows<\/span>
\nand you see the size of the cloth.<\/span>
\nThen it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,<\/span>
\nonly kindness that ties your shoes<\/span>
\nand sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,<\/span>
\nonly kindness that raises its head<\/span>
\nfrom the crowd of the world to say<\/span>
\nIt is I you have been looking for,<\/span>
\nand then goes with you everywhere<\/span>
\nlike a shadow or a friend.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naomi Shihab Nye<\/a>
\n<\/em>From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311635,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311634\/revisions\/311635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311629,"date":"2026-09-18T08:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311629"},"modified":"2026-09-18T08:01:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:01:28","slug":"lord-knows-what-i-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/lord-knows-what-i-am.html","title":{"rendered":"Lord Knows What I Am"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alex Lanz in\u00a0LARB:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cMR. BLOOM READ with relish the lustrous verses of Blake and Shelley,\u201d I am tempted to write, since Harold Bloom, the author of The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry <\/em>(1973), delighted in sharing his surname with the everyman hero of Jewish descent in James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>. The American critic, born in New York City to Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish parents in 1930, taught at Yale from 1955 until his death in 2019, his reputation proving as expansive as those of the poets he extolled, and at a time when those figures were critically out of fashion.\u00a0Tall tales grew around Bloom: that he was a prodigious reader who had finished Moby-Dick <\/em>before age 10, gifted with a photographic memory that let him recite Milton backward, and so on. Students in my younger-millennial age group, if we thought of him at all, considered Bloom a curmudgeonly taste baron from the 1990s. He seemed like a dangerous man, hidden in obscurity like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness<\/em>, in the unlit corner of some Yale building\u2019s cellar floor.<\/p>\n

No doubt these representations say more about me than about Bloom. But with The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom<\/em>, a new book of correspondence between Bloom and his literary colleagues (edited by the scholar Heather Cass White), we are afforded a chance to hear what Bloom had to say for himself. \u201cLord knows what I am,\u201d he wrote to the poet John Hollander, the \u201csavant\u201d of prosody, in 1975, \u201cnot a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist\u2014but a worthless m\u00e9lange of the gang of it.\u201d To the great Southern lyricist A. R. Ammons, he once wrote, \u201cDon\u2019t tell me I ought to write verse\u2014I don\u2019t want to, can\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t. Something will develop if I can just keep working, but it will be in prose. I\u2019m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something odder and less, a reader.\u201d<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Lanz in\u00a0LARB: \u201cMR. BLOOM READ with relish the lustrous verses of Blake and Shelley,\u201d I am tempted to write, since Harold Bloom, the author of The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), delighted in sharing his surname with the everyman hero of Jewish descent in James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses. The American critic, born…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311629"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311633,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311629\/revisions\/311633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311623,"date":"2026-09-18T07:45:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311623"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:45:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:45:42","slug":"the-next-frontier-is-not-artificial-intelligence-its-artificial-societies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-next-frontier-is-not-artificial-intelligence-its-artificial-societies.html","title":{"rendered":"The Next Frontier Is Not Artificial Intelligence\u2014It\u2019s Artificial Societies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Jennings in\u00a0The Singularity Hub:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"When most people hear \u201cAI,\u201d they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot, or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer.\u00a0But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions, and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI is no longer just generating an answer\u2014it is doing something about it.\u00a0That points to something much bigger than a better chatbot: a world in which AI agents act on our behalf and, increasingly, interact with other AI agents.<\/p>\n

An agent perceives what is happening, decides what to do, then takes actions to achieve this goal. It might book a journey<\/a>, monitor a supply chain<\/a>, coordinate a team<\/a>, or manage a household\u2019s finances<\/a>.\u00a0Now imagine not one agent, but millions of them. Your AI agent could negotiate a mortgage with your bank\u2019s agent, schedule surgery with a hospital\u2019s agent, and rearrange your travel plans by dealing directly with the agents of airlines, hotels, and insurers.<\/p>\n

This future is much closer than it sounds, and this should change the questions we are asking about AI.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Jennings in\u00a0The Singularity Hub: When most people hear \u201cAI,\u201d they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot, or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer.\u00a0But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions, and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311623"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311626,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311623\/revisions\/311626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311235,"date":"2026-09-18T06:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311235"},"modified":"2026-09-14T04:01:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T08:01:21","slug":"big-techs-contribution-to-economic-inequality-and-the-authoritarian-convergence-with-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/big-techs-contribution-to-economic-inequality-and-the-authoritarian-convergence-with-china.html","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech\u2019s Contribution to Economic Inequality and the Authoritarian Convergence with China"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Hoyt<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"In his recent book, Crack-Up Capitalism<\/a>: Market Radicals and Dreams of A World Without Democracy<\/em>, historian Quinn Slobodian offers what might be the closest thing we have to an epigraph for our present moment.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley often forgets its Hegel at its own risk. The German philosopher taught that the master is always dependent on the slave. Neither island nor cloud can exist without its underclass. Beyond the masses of app-mediated gig workers, even the vaunted artificial intelligence programs work only because of the often repetitive routines\u2026 of labor both skilled and unskilled\u2026The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slobodian is one of a few thinkers taking the risk of writing contemporary history, one of the most difficult but important of genres, especially in a disoriented and shifting age. Shipwrecked attempts litter the shoals of our rising seas, many once registered under the flags of oracular business consultants or breathless Great Man hagiographies. Does anyone now think the world was ever flat? The present, to invert a mid-century novel\u2019s famous opening line, is a foreign country. The pernicious side-effect of someone else\u2019s bright idea suddenly dominates everything. What was a trend for decades became a tipping point last week. What seemed important or forgivable no longer is. Causal chains are clouded by changing weather, and the diviners at Farmer\u2019s Almanac<\/em> have thrown in the towel. \u201cIs there anything Jack Ma can\u2019t do?\u201d a dazzled writer<\/a> asks of the founder of China\u2019s e-commerce giant, Alibaba, in 2012. Yes, it turns out, there is: Say no to Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

Distortions of attention are the hazards of thinking contemporary history. Already, free-range attention spans are further shortened when captured by the digital economy, and successions of world historical events are occluded by the price of gas or ground beef or manufactured online hysterias. Lotus-eaters all, we are desperately in need of reliable sea charts, healthier sustenance, and a repaired memory of where we were once trying to go.<\/p>\n

In the pre-pandemic decade of the 2010\u2019s, two narratives arose in relative independence of one another and now appear, in retrospect, to be much more closely intertwined: the phenomenon and critique of global inequality (most closely associated with the French economist Thomas Piketty), and the explosive growth of a new form of capitalism known as the platform economy or surveillance capitalism (closely associated with behavioral psychologist Shoshana Zuboff). Both developments were late expressions of the period of globalization that would conclude with the partial unraveling of the economic entente cordiale<\/em> between the United States and China, beginning in the First Trump Administration.<\/p>\n

What a handful of recent studies<\/a> suggest<\/a> is that the explosive growth and wealth of the second development \u2013 platform capitalism \u2013 has structurally contributed to the historical spike of the latter \u2013 global income and wealth inequality — since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Such an outcome has led some observers to further suggest that we have departed from capitalism altogether \u2013 or at least from that economic model that was premised on the wide distribution of the profit-seeking motive; and this not in exchange for socialism or unfettered markets or even monopoly capitalism, but for something else entirely.<\/p>\n

So-called \u201ctechno-feudalism\u201d is marked by a preoccupation among the world\u2019s largest firms less with productive investment or manufacturing than with the extraction of data through deployment of relatively low-cost and diversionary gadgets, which then guarantee a stream of much more valuable information for use in the shaping of consumer behavior. Increasingly, such firms buttress their market share through lucrative arrangements with state power. The avatars here are Google, Amazon, Uber, Tencent, Didi and Alibaba, among others. The corporate embrace of machine learning represents a deepening of commitment to this economic model.<\/p>\n

The rise to hegemony of digital platforms in the 2010\u2019s, which occurred more or less simultaneously in the United States and the People\u2019s Republic of China, can be thought of as a consequence of the failure of capitalism to generate investment, or the problem of \u2018secular stagnation\u2019. This was a widely noted problem at the time, with Paul Krugman penning a series of columns on the issue for the New York Times<\/em> beginning in the middle of the decade. The enormous post-2008 stimulus programs initiated at the time (and in the case of China, truly unprecedented in magnitude), and further elaborated in response to the pandemic in both the US and China, were the essential preconditions for platform companies to grow in capitalization, revenue and market share while the real economy was stuck in the doldrums of prolonged austerity.<\/p>\n

Low borrowing costs in the post-crisis decade did little to boost traditional manufacturing (though they triggered a housing bubble in China) but they did allow for firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft to acquire dozens of smaller companies on the cheap, thereby building out their increasingly sophisticated \u201cclosed garden\u201d emporia of digital services capable of ever-greater data collection capabilities.<\/p>\n

This explosive and lopsided growth of one economic sector at a time of stubborn overall economic growth and stagnating wages has profoundly transformed the world, but not in terms of enhanced corporate investment, worker productivity, or increased wages. Rather, it has restructured the organization of the most profitable firms and the mechanisms by which wealth is distributed throughout the global economy, primarily by moving it up the socioeconomic ladder. As economic historian Adam Tooze notes in his history<\/a> of the 2008 crisis, \u201ctwo thirds of nonfinancial firms that had managed to achieve a return on invested capital of 45% or more between 2000 and 2014 \u201cwere in either the health care or the technology sectors.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n

As political scientist Herman Schwartz documents<\/a>, in 2015, Apple reported cash reserves of $178 billion accumulated in less than a decade, with most of it held offshore. In comparison, Toyota\u2019s cash reserves, accumulated over a span of some forty years, were by 2015 between $40 and $45 billion, and the firm was (and is) headquartered in Tokyo. Thomas Piketty\u2019s Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em> was first published, fittingly, in 2013, though in it he had almost nothing to say about the digital economy then taking shape, nor its effect on the long-term growth of economic inequality since the 1970\u2019s.<\/p>\n

This story is central for those seeking to understand how the current build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure is financed. The ferociously expensive data center build-out is being paid for in part by the cash hoard accumulated by firms such as Microsoft and Facebook during the post-crisis decade. They literally have little else to do with it, apart from spending on occasional boondoggles such as virtual reality goggles or peeping-tom eyewear. The post-2008 stimulus with its low interest rates was disproportionately favorable to the technology sector, which had little fixed capital, low worker head-count and, with its assets primarily in intellectual property (IP) that it was able to easily domicile offshore, was able to avoid national corporate taxation.<\/p>\n

As a US Senate report on corporate offshoring<\/a> found in 2013, a unit of Apple domiciled in Ireland paid no taxes to any national government for the four years from 2009 to 2012. A French government report in 2013 found that \u201call big American Internet companies\u201d were doing the same thing in Europe. Although this is a strategy pursued by other industrial firms as well (such as General Electric), it is not as easy to do when assets consist of rolling stock, jet engines, or steel mills.<\/p>\n

But the story here isn\u2019t just about badly behaved tech companies, as relevant as that continues to be. Political scientist Herman Schwartz (2016) argues<\/a> that outsized tech growth in the decade of secular stagnation was the result of tax laws encouraging offshoring of IP, the reduced need for labor in tech, and the outsourcing of tech\u2019s supply chains, all of which combined to reduce the need for investment in a way that would circulate money to the rest of society. Schwartz writes:<\/p>\n

To understand what changed, we have to look at how IPR (intellectual property rights) firms generate profit and how the predominant form of industrial organization has evolved over the past four decades \u2026 The nature of IPRs as monopolies allows profits that these monopolies generate to accrue in firms with a lower propensity to invest, allows those firms to shrink their labor footprint to the smallest possible size (which concentrates wage income), and allows those firms to shift profits to low tax venues with greater ease than the industrial behemoths of the 1960\u2019s could.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Industrial behemoths, as in the case of Toyota mentioned above, could hardly claim to be domiciled in Ireland, often employed tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees, and were thus compelled to distribute a portion of revenue to labor and to the nation state (to \u201ccross-subsidize\u201d) in the form of corporate tax. For every iPhone 6 designed in California and sold in 2016, according to Schwartz, Apple collected a net $319 in revenue, while China\u2019s Foxconn pocketed $15 for putting the device together. This is why, by the mid-2010\u2019s, firms with heavy IP assets held the bulk of cash reserves, and why the rate of corporate profit jumped in the few years between 2011 and 2014 an equivalent of 3.3% of US GDP.<\/p>\n

Thus a paradox emerges. For all the thoughtful Marxist commentary<\/a> on capitalism\u2019s fundamental incompatibility with democracy, it may well be the case that the phase of industrial capitalism which obtained for roughly a century between 1870 and 1970 was in fact uniquely amenable to democracy. The need for large populations of laborers in the extraction of commodities and the manufacture of durable objects required a form of business organization that, of necessity, though obviously not without conflict, distributed some gains from productivity throughout the organization and thereby into broad reaches of society as well. The basis for a participatory community of informed citizens was laid on the grounds of employment in large organizations and living in a shared community.<\/p>\n

The political scientist Timothy Mitchell<\/a> has been keen to link the rise of nineteenth-century European democracy with the rise of an energy regime based on coal and the labor required to mine it. He then distinguishes this from the more colonial and less labor-oriented characteristic of capitalism once the switch was made from coal to oil, a less labor intensive enterprise. The argument Schwartz is making is that with the platform companies this switch has now gone even further, from the material assets of the industrial age to the intangible assets of the digital age, and to a system in which accrued wealth is restricted to an exceptionally small number of workers with little direct obligation to workers far away, rather than being distributed among many within a shared community.<\/p>\n

The consequences for democracy are plain, and find ready echoes in the libertarian rhetoric from Silicon Valley, which in its more extreme and racist forms disdains both labor and<\/em> democracy. Why should it be otherwise, if an investment in nations, communities, and workers has become exiguous to its very business model? It is worth noting that Steve Bannon, an early theorist of Trump\u2019s MAGA movement, sniffed out this elitist inclination early on, an indicator of often latent popular resistance to Silicon Valley dirigisme<\/em> among the working class.<\/p>\n

As Slobodian recounts in Crack-Up Capitalism<\/em>, there has been no shortage of technocratic designs for tech cities, tech zones, or tech protectorates in which Singapore or Hong Kong-like authoritarian mini-states, each seeking \u201cexit\u201d from the constraints of liberal democracy, social contract entitlements, or the messy encumbrances of history, are able to foster endless innovation unimpeded by the rules of politics or the disgruntlement of simple-minded masses as they are tracked and mined for data. The current opposition to data centers and license plate readers, so surprising to the coastal intelligentsia<\/a> of The New York Times<\/em> and Heatmap<\/em><\/a>, did not come out of nowhere. It is rooted in a growing and deeply structured class antagonism.<\/p>\n

In the proliferation of data centers, the American public has gotten a taste of techno-development with Chinese characteristics, if on a greatly reduced scale. We can only be grateful that the top-down onslaught of AI development does not generate the millions of displaced, the ecological destruction, or the formal, legalized regimes of discrimination deployed against the low-skilled, rural, and uneducated that has accompanied China\u2019s program of techno-development. But the germ of affinity and the will are both clearly there, as one can see in reports from Indiana to Michigan to Pennsylvania<\/a>. Data center opponents are characterized as poor and backward, living in \u201cshitty houses<\/a>\u201d which, if occupants are unhappy with the roar of the diesel and gas turbine generators installed across the street, they should simply sell<\/a> to their cryptomining or hyperscaling neighbors, and move away.<\/p>\n

As one Midwestern activist group<\/a> notes:<\/p>\n

In 2026 alone, we\u2019ve seen multiple enormous \u201chyperscale\u201d data centers approved in Illinois. The projected resource consumption is alarming: over 4,500MW of electricity (that\u2019s more than Chicago\u2019s energy demand) and an undisclosed amount of water. In many cases, project approval was ushered through with little public input and transparency, making it difficult for the public to fully understand the long term impacts on energy, water resources, and the community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How much easier things would be in China, where little can impede the wrecking balls.<\/p>\n

The case of China\u2019s turn to techno-development is important because it parallels in chronology and to some extent in ideological evolution that of the platform companies in the United States over the same period. It also illustrates foreclosed possibilities for alternatives both in China and the US. As Ya-Wen Lei shows in her fascinating study<\/a> The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China<\/em>, the Great Financial Crisis marked a watershed, as it had in the West. One half of the twin-engine plane of the global economy had been crippled in September of 2008. Export demand for Chinese manufactured goods cratered almost immediately.<\/p>\n

Within months, the administration of Premier Wen Jiabao put together a 4 trillion yuan stimulus program, three times larger than the US Troubled Asset Relief Program in proportion to Chinese GDP. The crisis led many in China to reconsider its existing export-driven trade relation with the US and Europe, and to advocate for bringing China up the value chain from manufacturing to technology and services. Among the earliest advocates of such a transition was Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

Such a transition had begun before the crisis among the coastal provinces, long at the forefront of China\u2019s economic evolution. In Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Shandong, the effects of a decade or more of land-intensive industrial development and in-migration by rural workers was making itself felt; there was little land left to build out according to the existing model.<\/p>\n

It was in these provinces in the middle 2000\u2019s that the idea of \u201cupgrading\u201d the local economy to a less land-intensive, less labor-intensive, less polluting model was initiated. And it was during this period that China\u2019s future leader, Xi Jinping served as party secretary of Zhejiang, China\u2019s fourth largest provincial economy by GDP. There, Xi demonstrated an enthusiasm for tech driven modernization.<\/p>\n

While serving in a previous position, Lei shows, Xi wrote an introductory essay on a late Qing intellectual, Yan Fu, who had been an important advocate of modernization along Western lines. In a hint of Xi\u2019s overall orientation, Yan Fu was known for translating the works of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer into Chinese. Yan is credited in particular with having translated the terms \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d and \u201csocial Darwinism\u201d into his native language.<\/p>\n

As Lei writes, \u201cXi expressed his great admiration for Yan. After stating that \u201ctechnology is the foremost productive force,\u201d Xi narrated how China lagged behind the West after the Industrial Revolution.\u201d As Lei reads this and other early writings, Xi held a widespread faith in the power of science and technology alone to elevate China to greatness. Although he touches on rural poverty and general inequality in these works, \u201csuch considerations were ultimately subordinate to the pursuit of S&T [science and technology] development.\u201d<\/p>\n

After 2008, the program of economic upgrading was taken up by Beijing and made the basis of rewards and incentives to municipal and provincial governments. These, in turn, developed extensive metrics for assessing the value or “obsoleteness” of entire industries and classes of workers. With the rise of Chinese tech firms and the systems of data collection and analysis that they enabled, municipalities began to sort what they considered to be desirable and undesirable industries and workers, allotting to some – the more educated and accomplished – coveted hukou<\/em> residential licenses and their associated access to quality public education and services, while denying them to migrant laborers with less education or connections.<\/p>\n

This was the beginning of China\u2019s comprehensive social credit system and its institutionalized discrimination against the rural and working poor – a digital validation of Yan Fu\u2019s social Darwinism.<\/p>\n

Most of China\u2019s big tech firms were founded in the 1990\u2019s and early 2000\u2019s. It was in the early 2010\u2019s that things really got going, as they took advantage of China\u2019s enormous domestic market.\u00a0 This was partly in response to government encouragement of high tech as a successor paradigm to export industrialism, and also to a tolerant regulatory environment under Xi\u2019s predecessor, Hu Jintao.<\/p>\n

A fledgling public space also took shape on China\u2019s early internet, and it was in the five years leading up to Xi\u2019s ascension as General Secretary in 2012 that a semi-public debate took place. The subject was the proper course of China\u2019s future development, and the ideal balance between technology-driven investment and social spending.<\/p>\n

In these heady years before Xi, Premier Wen Jiaobao could advocate for freedom of speech; Guangdong Communist Party Secretary Wang Yang could meet with labor unions and accede to certain demands; and Chongqing Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai could propose massive public housing and reform of the discriminatory hukou<\/em> registration system in favor of the rural poor.<\/p>\n

Given the relative autonomy of Chinese provincial governments to craft their own economic and social policies, certain among them came to stand as possible models for the future of China writ large. Wang Yang\u2019s in Guangdong came to stand for the maintenance of the coastal worldview of openness to global commerce and technological upgrading. Bo Xilai\u2019s inland city-state of Chongqing came to stand for a model that prioritized the venerable values of economic equality and redistribution, drawing heavily upon nostalgia for the Maoist era.<\/p>\n

In the event, neither model won out. With Xi\u2019s rise to power, coastal Guangdong\u2019s openness to foreign firms and technology was traded for a policy of self-strengthening. In Bo Xilai\u2019s left-populist agenda a number of senior Politburo members saw an unwelcome reversion to the instability of the Cultural Revolution and a challenge to Xi for the position of General Secretary. Following a truly Shakespearean episode of local intrigue, Bo Xilai was toppled and imprisoned, as was his wife, eliminating him as a potential competitor with Xi, together with the Chongqing model as a potential roadmap for China\u2019s future. Rural-urban inequality and economic redistribution have both permanently receded as a major focus of concern.<\/p>\n

In 2015, there followed the \u201cMade in China\u201d industrial policy that, a year before Donald Trump entered the White House, began to undo the US-China entente cordiale <\/em>by aiming for self-sufficiency and an explicit bid for world leadership in technology. <\/em>In 2020, Xi personally suspended the IPO of Jack Ma\u2019s Ant Group less than two days before its offering on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges, launching a multi-year crackdown on China\u2019s most successful platform enterprises.<\/p>\n

Although Chinese platform firms had been closely partnering with municipalities on governance, urban planning and surveillance projects for some time, Xi\u2019s clampdown made it clear that the vast power accumulated by the platforms over the Chinese domestic workforce (in terms of such basic issues as piece rates, contract terms, and data privacy) would be checked and subordinated by the even vaster power of the Chinese state.<\/p>\n

Such resistance has only recently<\/a> been encountered by the American tech firms. Observing the spectacle of an autocrat acting to check the abuses of digital robber barons, Yannis Varoufakis has wryly remarked in his book, Techno-Feudalism<\/em><\/a>, \u201cit remains endlessly intriguing that the only glimmer of hope for any demos<\/em> round the world shines in the midst of a society under totalitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n

If democracy is a practice like anything else, and practices atrophy when they fall out of use, then it is not surprising that the concentration of wealth and power that have arisen in American tech have distanced its leaders from an affinity with the democratic ethos. This is certainly the tendency inherent in the very practices of data extraction and surveillance, which are in the unsolicited process of reworking fundamental assumptions of the Western political tradition regarding liberty, privacy, and individual freedom. The notion that knowledge is power, in its original Foucauldian formulation, may never have been truer than it is now.<\/p>\n

Yet the Panopticon was only a prefiguration of surveillance capitalism, when the most basic social activity, or even the need to simply subsist, leave digital traces with third parties which thereby come to possess some slight ownership and control over you. Even so, contemporary history shows, as in Chinese debate in the years leading up to 2012, and the wave of American resistance to Big Tech\u2019s forced deployment of artificial intelligence, that the shape of technology and its development are never predestined, nor fated, nor inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by David Hoyt In his recent book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and Dreams of A World Without Democracy, historian Quinn Slobodian offers what might be the closest thing we have to an epigraph for our present moment. Silicon Valley often forgets its Hegel at its own risk. The German philosopher taught that the master is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1935,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1935"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311235"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311426,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311235\/revisions\/311426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311260,"date":"2026-09-18T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T09:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311260"},"modified":"2026-09-14T03:53:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:53:39","slug":"the-contract-on-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-contract-on-america.html","title":{"rendered":"The Contract On America"},"content":{"rendered":"

by John Ambrosio<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"In 2001, Grover Norquist<\/a>, the Republican anti-tax crusader, famously quipped in an interview that he did not want to abolish government, \u201cI simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.\u201d The radical shrinking of the federal government under Trump has happened at a speed and on a scale that is unprecedented.<\/p>\n

This raises the question: Are Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party willing to jeopardize the future viability of U.S. society in order to achieve their political and ideological goals? Has the Republican Party become a kind of death cult hellbent on destroying everything that enables ordinary people to survive and thrive? Does their hatred of liberalism, and desire for vengeance, override their instinct for national self-preservation?<\/p>\n

In a recent podcast, Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Giat<\/a>, two prominent historians of authoritarianism and European fascism, discussed whether the U.S. is being murdered or is committing suicide. That is, whether it is being deliberately destroyed by Trump and MAGA Republicans or if a significant part of the electorate is committing national suicide, whether the descent into authoritarianism is a self-inflicted wound.<\/p>\n

The answer is clearly both. There is a deliberate and systematic effort by Trump and his MAGA allies to demolish liberal constitutional democracy and dismantle and eliminate federal agencies and executive departments that comprise the modern U.S. state, aided and abetted by Republican voters and others who continue to support Trump and who elect MAGA Republicans that mostly rubber stamp his cruel and dangerous policies.<\/p>\n

As Snyder and Ben-Giat point out, Trump and his MAGA allies have systematically defunded significant parts of the national infrastructure for scientific, technological, and health sciences research and gutted federal agencies tasked with ensuring that people have access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated food, and that protect them from harmful chemicals, preventable diseases, predatory corporations, defective products, natural disasters, and climate breakdown, among many other vital functions.<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s baseless and lawless attacks on federal agencies is already being felt in recent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, like cyclosporiasis, and preventable diseases, such as measles, the most damaging and destructive effects will likely unfold over the medium- to long-term as the social conditions that enable people to thrive are degraded over time. Despite varying degrees of corporate capture, federal agencies have historically provided some degree of protection from the vicissitudes of rapacious capitalism and imposed some limits, however inadequate, on the depredations of extreme wealth and corporate power.<\/p>\n

There is no going home again. Even if portions of federal agencies and executive departments are reconstituted or partially rebuilt by future Democratic administrations, the massive loss of institutional knowledge and expertise cannot be easily replaced. Nor will it be easy to restore the trust of federal workers who were summarily fired without cause or due process, or to assure potential employees that their jobs will not be at risk when the political pendulum swings back. To obstruct efforts to reconstitute federal agencies, Trump is altering and destroying<\/a> the databases they rely on to inform and make policy decisions.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s attack on the federal government is the latest iteration of a decades-long counter-revolution against New Deal and Great Society liberalism, and the cultural legacy of the 1960s that arguably began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1994, Republicans passed the \u201cContract With America,\u201d a ten-point legislative plan that not only cut social programs and taxes, but marked a turning point in modern U.S. politics, ushering in an era of political combat in which bipartisanship and compromise were viewed as weakness, as a capitulation to their political enemies in the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

In the future, Republicans would take no prisoners and were all-in on doing whatever was necessary to achieve their political goals, even if it meant blowing up traditional democratic norms and violating legislative practices. Republicans were determined to play political hardball, to obstruct the legislative agenda and judicial nominations of the Democratic Party, regardless of its corrosive effects on democracy and the functioning of the federal government.<\/p>\n

This political ethos was perhaps most dramatically illustrated in 2016 when Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader at the time, refused to meet with or hold hearings to consider Merrick Garland, president Obama\u2019s nominee for the Supreme Court, which resulted in Republicans stealing a seat from Democrats. It was also manifest in numerous acts of political brinkmanship and skirmishes with Democrats over raising the national debt ceiling, approving budget appropriations, and inserting unrelated social policies into must-pass legislation.<\/p>\n

The Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025, the master plan for an authoritarian takeover of the country, aims to dismantle the architecture of liberal constitutional democracy and the administrative state. While candidate Trump claimed to have never heard of the project, and initially distanced himself from its policy recommendations, the White House nonetheless wound up implementing much of its political agenda.<\/p>\n

Trump issued a raft of executive orders<\/a> in 2025 that sought to exert control over the federal government by presidential fiat, reshaping federal agencies and executive departments through workforce reductions, the elimination of diversity programs, the redirection of regulatory priorities, and other changes without the advice or consent of Congress, whether or not he had the constitutional or statutory authority to do so.<\/p>\n

To oversee the process of dismantling and demolishing key parts of the administrative state, Trump installed Russell Vought as his budget director, who was a contributor to Project 2025 and a strong advocate of the unitary executive, of an expansive view of presidential power. Vought\u2019s anti-government crusade was given an important assist by the MAGA-majority Supreme Court, most notably in Trump v. Slaughter<\/em><\/a> (2026), which gave Trump the authority to fire the heads of independent federal agencies at will, and in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo<\/em><\/a> (2024), which stripped federal agencies of the power to interpret federal statutes, to promulgate rules and regulations that are not explicitly authorized by Congress.<\/p>\n

The demolition of large parts of the federal government began in earnest when Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by executive order shortly after taking office in January 2025, which was neither an official government department nor concerned with efficiency. Trump gave his \u201cco-president,\u201d Elon Musk, free reign to take a sledgehammer (or woodchipper) to agencies whose missions conflicted with his ideological beliefs or business interests (which were often the same). Musk and his gang of twenty-somethings slashed and burned their way through federal agencies, indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of federal employees, cancelling contracts that contained prohibited words they associated with DEI programs, and rejecting research proposals that did not appear to align with Trump\u2019s far-right political agenda.<\/p>\n

One of Musk\u2019s first targets was the Agency for International Development (USAID). Ignorant of what the agency actually did, and the vital role it played in sustaining some of the poorest people on the planet, he enthusiastically and glibly fired agency employees and eliminated programs that condemned millions of people<\/a>, including hundreds of thousands of children, to an untimely and unnecessary death: what you might call homicide by budget cuts. Of course, the irony is that this horrific crime was inflicted on desperately poor people by the richest person in the world, who denied the consequences of his actions and refused to take responsibility for them.<\/p>\n

Trump and MAGA Republicans have systematically defunded the national infrastructure for research not only because they associate science with liberalism, but to discredit science as an independent source of knowledge and expertise, because it provides an authoritative counter narrative to their false claims and politically-motivated policies.<\/p>\n

Similarly, institutions of higher education are viewed as outposts of the political opposition, as incubators of liberalism and producers of knowledge that can challenge the lies, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and gaslighting of Trump and MAGA Republicans. The assault on science<\/a> had the added benefit of enabling Trump, under the guise of combatting antisemitism, to strong-arm prominent universities, to extort payments and bully them into accepting unprecedented federal interference in their internal affairs by threatening to withhold or cancel funding for scientific research.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s cabinet secretaries took a similar approach, purging executive departments of senior military officers and civil servants who were deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump or potentially unsupportive of his political priorities. Knowledgeable and experienced career professionals were replaced with inexperienced and incompetent MAGA loyalists and sycophants. People who were associated with DEI programs or considered part of the \u201cdeep state\u201d were sacked, including anyone involved with investigating or prosecuting Trump for his crimes.<\/p>\n

Of course, the self-immolation of the U.S. is not confined to the domestic sphere, but extends to international relations as well. The Trump administration has successfully alienated much of the rest of the world, unwilling to consult or work with allies. Shunning diplomacy, Trump prefers to go it alone and impose his will by bullying other countries. To this end, he imposed senseless and punishing tariffs on friends and foes alike; unilaterally violated international trade agreements (the World Trade Organization and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement); withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), the Paris Climate Accord, and the World Health Organization; attacked the International Criminal Court; threatened NATO allies; and launched an unprovoked war on Iran. In doing do, Trump succeeded in blowing up the post-war international order, destabilizing the global economy and geopolitical relations.<\/p>\n

Trump paid off the oil, gas, and coal industries for their financial support by denying the existence of the climate crisis and calling it a hoax, and by eliminating subsidies for renewable energy in the Inflation Reduction Act; cancelling leases for offshore wind farms and paying firms to abandon projects already under way; eliminating California\u2019s emissions standards for cars and trucks; repealing the Endangerment Finding that underpins the EPA\u2019s authority to regulate greenhouse gases and fossil fuel emissions; subsidizing coal-fired power plants and preventing the closure of others; opening up national parks, wilderness areas, and coastal marine habitats for oil exploration and mining operations; dismantling the National Renewable Energy Lab; and downsizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And the list goes on.<\/p>\n

This raises the question: Why would Trump and his MAGA allies deliberately damage the U.S. in ways that jeopardize its social and economic viability? One answer is that the White House \u201coperates in a cloud of delusion<\/a>\u201d that prevents Trump and his cronies from recognizing what is actually happening. Insofar as they are cognizant of the consequences of their actions, they are utterly indifferent to the costs they impose on others because they do not bear them and believe their wealth will shield them from their reckless behavior. They would rather blow up U.S. society than have to compromise with and accommodate liberal beliefs and values, than have to live in a racially diverse and pluralist society that places some limits on their ability to exercise power. In their eyes, burning the house down is preferable to the alternative.<\/p>\n

The White House presides over a kind of smash and grab mafia-state authoritarianism that functions as massive grifting and looting (of the national treasury) operation. Trump does not care what he breaks (or tears down) in pursuing his personal and political priorities. To reward major doners and political allies, which include Silicon Valley billionaires, ethnonationalists, and evangelical Christians, Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress have reshaped the federal government to accommodate and promote their interests and political agendas, freeing Big Tech from government regulation, facilitating the mass deportation of (mostly black and brown) undocumented and legal immigrants, and empowering far-right evangelicals to imbue federal law and public policy with white Christian Nationalism.<\/p>\n

While the MAGA faithful willfully blind themselves to Trump\u2019s lies and distortions of reality, many Republican elected officials simply go along to get along, wary of opposing Trump, who will not only primary them, but signal his online mob of extremists to viciously attack anyone he considers disloyal, often with threats of violence. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the unflagging support of MAGA Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court who have largely abdicated their constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on the abuse of presidential power, enabling Trump to act with virtual impunity.<\/p>\n

Republican elected officials are fearful of the consequences of departing from the group think and loyalty signaling demanded by Trump. This is reminiscent of totalitarianism, of a society in which people pre-emptively censor themselves because they fear the indiscriminate and arbitrary use of state power to harass, intimidate, and threaten them with violence. Trump\u2019s cabinet meetings are a Stalinist spectacle of fear and fealty, a demonstration of the price people must pay, in humiliation and self-debasement, to seek the approval of the mad king and not become a target of his uncontrolled rage, childish vitriol, and peevish need for vengeance.<\/p>\n

Add to this the savage cuts to Medicaid, the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), SNAP benefits (food stamps), and other social programs that are vital to the health and welfare of millions of people, which were passed with only Republican votes.<\/p>\n

The cold hard fact is that the U.S. is a politically unstable country and unreliable ally that is capable of swinging sharply back and forth between two opposed and largely irreconcilable visions of America. Even if a wave election succeeds in defeating MAGA Republicans, it will likely not indicate a reliable shift in public opinion or a realignment of partisan identities. The 2024 election was not a vibe shift, but an expression of inchoate discontent and anger.<\/p>\n

The U.S. is poised on a political knife\u2019s edge, with an almost evenly divided national electorate and highly volatile undecided swing and low-propensity voters who can move in unpredictable ways that determine the outcome of elections, who are fearful and desperate to regain a sense of agency and control over their lives, and who want to push back against government corruption and the entrenched economic and political power of oligarchs and large corporations.<\/p>\n

From a historical perspective, the current situation in the U.S. is a chronicle of self-destruction foretold. Stephen Marche<\/a> argues that the current political crisis in America \u201chas been there from the beginning.\u201d What was \u201cunique in the founding of the United States,\u201d he insists, was the \u201ccapacity to turn the violence and idealism\u201d of the American revolution \u201cinto mythology,\u201d to create \u201ca sense of the United States as a unique country, an exception to history<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notion of American exceptionalism has deep roots in national mythology and is an ideological pillar of national identity, of what Americans tell themselves about who they are, what kind of country they live in, and the role their nation plays in the world. That is, that America is not like other countries, that it occupies a special place among nations, preordained to lead the world and guided by divine providence. It\u2019s a democratic beacon on a hill for others to aspire to, the north star of nations. But America is not exceptional, it emerged and developed under exceptional circumstances and historical conditions, but is susceptible to the same national delusions, mythologies, disremembering, and social and historical forces that other peoples and nations are subject to, which includes the capacity for self-destruction.<\/p>\n

American exceptionalism has blinded many Americans to their own capacity for mass delusion, into believing that the country will respond differently to crises, in a more enlightened way, than other nations. This is a dangerous assumption that leaves people vulnerable and unprepared to deal with objective reality. Much will depend on the ability of people to change and adapt to new circumstances, and the cultural values and attitudes they bring to addressing national problems. If Americans remain mired in polarizing beliefs and conflicts over national mythology and identity they will be less able to seriously address the current social and political crisis.<\/p>\n

What are the likely consequences of drowning large parts of the federal government in the bathtub? How will ordinary Americans respond to a steady decline in their quality of life, and likely their longevity, that the bulldozing of federal agencies will inevitably bring? That is, to their lives becoming increasingly onerous, insecure, and unsafe?<\/p>\n

In the long arc of history previous societies that faced similar conditions led to their collapse<\/a>, brought down by environmental exploitation and degradation, internecine violence, the short-sightedness of rulers, and an unwillingness or inability to adapt to new circumstances and conditions.<\/p>\n

While it will be difficult to restore what has been destroyed by the reckless, foolish, and thuggish actions of Trump and MAGA Republicans, some of the functions that were previously provided by federal agencies are now being taken up by a parallel structure of state agencies and alliances<\/a> in some areas of the country, but many of the problems they seek to address require national solutions: polluted air and water are not confined within state boundaries.<\/p>\n

While states can pick up some of the slack, the reality is that there is no substitute for the institutional knowledge, the experience and expertise, the technical and financial resources that federal agencies and executive departments can bring to bear in addressing national issues. Nor is there any substitute for the national research infrastructure, for the innovation and productivity gains that are vital to economic growth and social cohesion.<\/p>\n

If these conditions persist, Americans will become poorer, sicker, more divided, and less able to deal with the worsening effects of climate breakdown. The U.S. will likely limp along for quite some time, but the great unraveling of the \u201cexceptional\u201d nation may have already begun.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by John Ambrosio In 2001, Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax crusader, famously quipped in an interview that he did not want to abolish government, \u201cI simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.\u201d The radical shrinking of the federal government under…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1933,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1933"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311260"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311423,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311260\/revisions\/311423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311300,"date":"2026-09-18T04:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T08:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311300"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:13:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:13:06","slug":"my-girlfriend-broke-up-with-me-and-left-me-with-a-camper-van","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/my-girlfriend-broke-up-with-me-and-left-me-with-a-camper-van.html","title":{"rendered":"My Girlfriend Broke Up With Me And Left Me With A Camper Van"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Eric Schenck<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Back in December of 2022, I was on top of the world. I was introducing my entire family to my girlfriend, and we were just weeks away from the trip of a lifetime:<\/span><\/p>\n

Driving our newly bought camper van all the way from Texas to Panama and back again\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Life was good.<\/span><\/p>\n

But how fast things can change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What this trip was supposed to be:<\/p>\n