Sturgeon Full Moon rising over Yosemite National Park: NAJ screen shot
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
Reading the Sunday New York Times is not what it used to be. Nothing is as good as it used to be. But on occasion, if you look closely enough, you will run into a cogent thought or two that puts things in context and allows you to understand what’s really going on.
I’m not talking about all the sensational clickbait that dominates all media channels now, including the Times, every social media platform, even public talk radio and cable television news talk, including msNbc. I say it like Howard Stern in the movie about N-bc.
Liberals think they are getting informed. Instead, they are just getting entertained as news junkies and doused with the same chemical pollutant conservatives get on Fox News. Both disrupt the human brain and make any cogent, original thought on any subject nearly impossible.
Turn it all off, go to the mountain woods, read and think. That’s what I do.
Let me recommend only two columns for you on this Sunday, which you might not even find out about on Facebook until Wednesday, next week or maybe never, considering the Meta bots’ bias against current news of any importance.
Ben Rhodes, a contributing Opinion writer at the Times and author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made,” published a piece this week under the headline:
How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America
I’ve been writing about this for some time in all kinds of ways, largely ignored and dismissed by the addicts of social media and cable TV. They love to have their brains massaged into mush by famous talking heads and celebrity podcasters.
Rhodes starts out by talking about the “disquieting” new film “Eddington,” in which director Ari Aster captures the American tendency to now live obsessively in the present.
In my opinion, it’s not all their fault. Our communications system has been broken on purpose. But read on and we’ll get back to that thought in the end.
“As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives. In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society.
“His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness. Today, his takeover of our national psyche appears complete.”
As “Eddington” excruciatingly reminds us, the comparatively moderate first Trump administration ended in a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, mass protests and a violent insurrection. The fact that he returned to power even after those calamities seemed to confirm his instinct that America has become an enterprise with a limitless margin for error, a place where individuals — like superpowers — can avoid the consequences of their actions.
“Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” he said in his Inaugural Address. “But as you see today, here I am.”
Here I am. The implicit message? When we looked at Mr. Trump onstage, we saw ourselves.
Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the chief executives forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.
Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.
We are all living in the disorienting present, swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound. The data centers get built. And we forget the inconvenience of reality itself: Mr. Trump may be able to escape the consequences of his actions; the rest of us cannot.
This crisis of short-termism has been building for a long time.
In the decades after World War II, the Cold War was a disciplining force. Competition with the Soviets compelled both parties to support — or at least accept — initiatives as diverse as the national security state, basic research, higher education, international development and civil rights. Despite partisan differences, there was a long-term consensus around the nation’s purpose.
With the end of the Cold War, politics descended into partisan political combat over seemingly small things, from manufactured scandals to culture wars. This spiral was suspended, briefly, to launch the war on terror — the last major bipartisan effort to remake government to serve a long-term objective, in this case a dubious one: waging a forever war abroad while making much of American life at home more secure.
By the time Barack Obama took office, a destabilizing asymmetry had taken hold. Democrats acquiesced to the war on terror, and Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of reforms like Obamacare or a clean-energy transition. Citizens United v. F.E.C. led to a flood of money in politics, incentivizing the constant courting of donors more intent on preventing government action than encouraging it. The courts were increasingly politicized. The internet-driven fracturing of media rewarded spectacle and conspiracy theory in place of context and cooperation. Since 2010, the only venue for major legislation has been large tax and spending bills that brought vertiginous swings through the first Trump and the Biden administrations.
The second Trump administration has fully normalized the ethos of short-termism. Mr. Trump does have an overarching promise about the future. But it is rooted in what he is destroying, not what he is building. By dismantling the administrative state, starving the government of funds, deregulating the economy, unraveling the international order, punishing countries with arbitrary tariffs and whitening the nation through mass deportations, he will reverse the globalization that has shaped our lives and the government that was built during the Cold War. On the other side of this destruction, he says, a new “golden age” awaits.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, worries that Democrats fail to understand the resonance of this vision. “We see all the destruction,” he told me, “but what we’re not seeing is that for the Trump voter, this is a strategy of reclaiming greatness.”
Precisely because this is correct as a political diagnosis, Democrats must convey how Mr. Trump’s approach is more of a pyramid scheme than a plan. Cuts to research will starve innovation. Tariffs are likely to drive trade to China. Tax cuts will almost certainly widen inequality. Mass deportations predictably divide communities and drive down productivity. The absence of international order risks more war. Deregulation removes our ability to address climate change and A.I. Mr. Trump is trying one last time to squeeze some juice out of a declining empire while passing the costs on to future generations. Beyond the daily outrages, that is the reality that Democrats must contend with.
“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in another era of destruction, “and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We may be fated to live in such a time. But what new world will be born after this time?
Yes, in the short- term, Democrats must mobilize to ensure that we still have a democratic foundation to build upon on the other side. Yet their animating purpose should be to imagine, and then build, what will come after.
During the Kennedy-Johnson era, a youthful president and his successor forged a vision expansive enough to encompass desegregation, a stronger social safety net, investments in education, the creation of U.S.A.I.D. and the Peace Corps and the ascent of the space program. It was undercut by political violence and the moral and practical costs of Vietnam, yet it shaped our society so comprehensively that Republicans are still seeking to reverse it. Those advances depended not just on action by government but also the transformative participation of the civil rights movement, business and labor, universities and a media and popular culture that did not shy from politics or capitulate to reactionary forces. It was a whole-of-society fight for the future.
Today, change similarly depends upon leaning into discomfort instead of avoiding division or offering false reassurance. Democrats must match the sense of crisis many Americans feel. Mr. Khanna summarized concerns that plague far too many Americans: “I don’t see myself in this future” and “What’s going to happen to my kids?” That existential crisis was the reason Mr. Trump was returned to power; his opposition needs to meet it.
This is not about skipping ahead to the fine points of policy proposals; it’s about a coherent vision. Instead of simply defending legacy programs, we should be considering what our social safety net is for. We should attack wealth inequality as an objective and propose solutions for deploying A.I. while protecting the dignity of human work and the vitality of our children. We need to envision a new immigration system, a clean-energy transition that lowers costs for consumers and a federal government that can once again attract young people to meet national challenges. Think of what a new Department of Education or development agency could do. We can no longer cling to a dying postwar era; we need to negotiate a new international order.
Under President Joe Biden, Democrats did take bold steps to confront climate change, promote manufacturing and invest in technology. Yet the sum felt less than the parts because legislation wasn’t accompanied by communication across the country, the mobilization of different sectors of society or an instinct for the mood of a restive and anti-establishment electorate. Unlike Mr. Trump, Democrats have been reluctant to alienate big donors, stand behind controversial positions or abandon language that polls well but sounds hopelessly inauthentic. The party has appeared to grow older, lethargic and less culturally relevant.
Even when presented with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York — an innovative example of fresh political tactics and policies — many party leaders recoiled. The party seems — quite literally — afraid of its own future. It is past time for Democrats to do what Mr. Mamdani did in his campaign: get out in communities. Don’t live in fear of bad-faith attacks. Mine cities and state legislatures for new ideas. Enlist civil society, faith groups, beleaguered universities and industry in envisioning an alternative future. Abandon campaign financing that makes you beholden to donors who make you hypocrites. Make a concerted effort to facilitate generational change, so that the faces of the party are younger, different and more diverse.
Mr. Trump is a 79-year-old strongman nostalgic for the past. His domination of the present is not permanent, but it is leading many Americans to live in the status quo he commands while ignoring where we are going. To overcome that reality, Democrats must mobilize people to believe in the future.
Can they do it? I don’t know. It doesn’t appear so.
The second column to recommend today was not in today’s Sunday paper online. It came out last week. I found it by scrolling down in the Opinion section, where most of the best writing occurs these days.
It was written by Garrett M. Graff, a journalist, historian and author, most recently, of “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.”
How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness
He writes about the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II, coming at, what he calls, “a most peculiar time.”
“We can’t mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons,” he points out. “The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.”
At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.
That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb.
From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.
The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”
One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.
That the push came from refugees from fascist Europe was not a coincidence. “These people — these Hungarian-, German- and Italian-born — knew the organization in dictatorial countries; it occurred to them that there might be ties between research and military applications, that in Germany all scientific work might have been enrolled in the war effort,” Laura Fermi — the wife of the atomic pioneer Enrico — wrote later. “American-born and -raised physicists had not yet found the door out of their ivory tower: The first knew the military state and the concentration of powers, the latter had seen only democracy and free enterprise.”
The physicist Arthur Holly Compton — who would go on to lead the effort to build the world’s first nuclear reactor in December 1942, tucked in an old squash court at the University of Chicago — explained: “Research in new fields of science had not been recognized by the United States government as a significant source of national strength. There was at Washington no individual or office having power to deal adequately with a new scientific development whose importance, though urgent and vital, was ill defined. It was simply not in our tradition.”
That arms-length relationship didn’t last long. What came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion initiative, employed hundreds of thousands of Americans by 1945 in sites from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Los Alamos, N.M. World War II efforts like it and the “Rad Lab” at M.I.T., which helped pioneer radar, forever transformed the country and the world.
Out of this grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology and education efforts. Those fields became a source of national strength and arguably the primary driver of American economic hegemony and prosperity in the eight decades since.
Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy.
The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.
Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy. Agencies like the National Science Foundation have been gutted, and the administration’s war on universities is already leading to huge cuts at science and health labs around the country; the Republican Congress and Trump administration are squashing progress in technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles that the rest of the world is mostly keen to adopt, likely leaving the United States not only behind but potentially not even in the game.
Even necessities like weather forecasting and high-quality government data collection face wreckage, and officials are starting to unwind public health advances like fluoride in water and mandatory childhood vaccinations. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is targeting for cuts research breakthroughs that appear just around the corner — including mRNA-based treatments that could help address high-mortality diseases like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer.
In addition, there is the administration’s war on immigration and its hostility to foreign researchers and students coming to the United States to build careers, discover breakthroughs and found start-ups that could transform the world. For much of the past century, the pull of America’s great universities, openness to science and tradition of democracy has brought the smartest minds to our shores, just as it did Fermi, Wigner, Teller and most of the other core participants in the Manhattan Project.
Among the country’s most elite business club — the five companies with over a $2 trillion market cap — immigrants and their offspring played a key role in all of them, from Apple’s Steve Jobs (the son of a Syrian immigrant) and Google’s Sergey Brin (born in Moscow) to the Taiwanese-born Jensen Huang of Nvidia and even Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, got a critical early investment from his adoptive father, a Cuban refugee.
It is all the more puzzling that the attack on universities and government-supported research has come from the Trump administration — which in 2020 led the closest and equally herculean analogue of a modern Manhattan Project, the Operation Warp Speed effort to develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine in stunning time. It is equally puzzling that this model of development is undermined by figures like Elon Musk, a onetime immigrant student, and Marc Andreessen, whose fortune came from Netscape, which was built on inventions supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
The world stands on the precipice of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that might, with time, prove as transformational as the unlocking of the atom did during World War II. Whether we can hold onto our scientific advantage, though, is an open question.
If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.
Final Thoughts
Now back to my original thoughts on these subjects. We must travel back in time to find the truth.
Back in the winter of 2020, in the Hellscape year as the coronavirus was just reaching America’s shores and Donald Trump was melting down in Washington trying to save himself from defeat by a Democrat in the election coming up in the fall, I was embedded on a small farm on the edge of the Conecuh National Forest just north of Pensacola, Florida. My friend and writing partner David Underhill in Mobile, Alabama, had died in November, 2019 before Covid-19 had become a thing. My 93-year-old mother died in Birmingham in December. And my loyal and beautiful dog Jefferson died on Christmas Day after a trip to the dog beach at Gulf Breeze.
Not overburdened by the click bait on cable or social media, I put my thinking cap on, conducted a bunch of research into human evolution, and wrote a three part series that summed up where we were as a country and a people, explained the rise of Trump better than anyone ever has, and proposed a solution to get us out of our conundrum.
Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?
How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism
Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet
The lede: “Who wants to stop Donald Trump and Facebook from destroying democracy and the planet?”
Of course not enough people paid attention, their attention spans already overtaxed, and no venture capital was forthcoming to fund my ideas. But at least somehow enough of the people got the message, Democrats stopped arguing with each other for a few minutes in comments, and Joe Biden was able to overcome Trump in that election.
Too bad it was not enough for a sustainable victory over Trumpism. The people just doubled down in their addiction to cable TV and social media platforms, which grew increasingly worse at informing people about what was actually important to pay attention too. The inverted pyramid of news delivered in order of importance was destroyed completely, and Trump came back into power. You know the rest.
I have no more solutions to offer. The only advice I can think of now is for everyone to save yourselves by going wherever you can to escape the catastrophes to come. Immerse yourself in whatever you love doing for whatever time you and we have left. Nothing is going to get any better in the foreseeable future. Everything is about to get a whole lot worse.
See you down the road or out on the trail, hopefully in Yosemite if I can make it out of D.C. alive and get across the country without breaking down.
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