Truly excellent articulation of the existential crisis we face, Mike. It would be even more influential, I imagine, if you should tighten it up into a shorter version.
"Their framework literally cannot process regime change. They can optimize within systems but can’t recognize when systems themselves are under attack."
This is the key insight into why Democratic Party officials are, for the most part, paralyzed. There is another reason, though. Liberals technocrat elites control the party, and are aligned with corporate donors, rather than their constituents. Economists have been decrying the destruction of the middle class, and the complete cessation of economic mobility between classes, for decades. The middle class didn't evaporate; they were pushed down into the lower two income quintiles, essentially creating two economic classes in the US; the working poor, and the wealthy. The Democratic Party elite knows this full well, and it is the reason they made a conscious decision to abandon rural voters in the heartland, and shift their platform from economic issues to DEI policies. DEI matters hugely to a small minority of Americans, and has served to distract coastal well-off liberals from the increasingly dire economic situation of the majority of Americans. The far right Republicans, and the liberal elite Democrats, collaborated on creating the policy vacuum that allowed the rise of "populism", which has in turned been weaponized by neo-fascist MAGAs.
I was a Nordic libertarian once and your writing reminds me a lot of my own crisis many years ago. But for me it was much easier to find a path I think because having grown up in Scandinavia I got a see a system that works.
Social democracy really works, but it was not clear to me as a libertarian why it worked because like you I took the heavy date oriented path early in life.
The idea of social democrats is that society is always a fight between different stake holders. Liberals just see individuals. Social democrats see whole groups with different interests and try to balance the power of those groups: the corporations, the workers, the environmentalists, the common people, the rich, women, men, minorities, the majority, farmers, the urban people. These are different groups of people and often we can belong in many overlapping groups.
The social democratic vision of Democracy is a form of stakeholder democracy where one tries to balance these stakeholders and the American liberal tradition has done no such thing. It has ignored that one group has take disproportionate large share of power and wealth and that has created a massive imbalance in the system.
Here are some things to consider, that many are not aware of about the Nordic model: The trust levels have one up. Let me repeat that. Norwegians today trust each other MORE today than in the past. A whopping 70% believe other people can be trusted. That has occurred despite mass immigration. More people in Norway today are foreign born than in the US in 2025. It doesn't mean immigration doesn't cause problems. We cannot keep going like this.
But I mention this to emphasize the Nordic trust is an outcome of POLICY and not homogeneity. We deliberately pushed to reduce inequalities between social classes but also genders. The result is that people trust each other more. That means people trust government and institutions more.
It is important point to mention because many Americans think what America is going through is a universal reality produced everywhere due to modernity itself. But Nordic countries are very modern societies with people working tech jobs, surfing the internet, using their smart phones just like the US. Yet societal outcomes are totally different. It goes to show that politics matters. We are not helpless flowing in a particular direction due to technology and economic change. We end up where we are because of important political choices taken or not taken by society.
Nordics are not liberal societies. They are social democratic. Meaning a very strong emphasis has been placed on groups rather than just individual freedom. Emphasis has been on creating a society for the common people. Outcomes has mattered just as much as opportunity.
But we also see challenges. It is why I am a democratic socialist. We have also seen a gradual push towards a more liberal model away from the social democratic model and I fear we will face an American future if we keep going down that path.
Democracy begins within. Integral to the clash you've well-described is the psychological internalization of autocracy, particularly by the religious fundamentalists -- part of why the drive to feudalism is so deeply tied to the evangelical and hard-right Catholic movements. Their fundamental premise is autocracy at every scale, from within the individual, to the family, and on up. Thiel and Vance, and the Supreme Court majority, are such religionists.
We also see the recent popularity of sci-fi and fantasy set in past and future feudal cultures, where the drama is about which of the royal contenders is truly favored by the fates and the cleverness of their schemes. The book covers in the sci-fi/fantasy section are given over to such royalist fantasies, rather than the technology-enabled futures of a half-century back, with current depiction of tech now largely relegated to cyberpunk steampunk retro fantasies.
For our societies to be democratically self-governing, we need the larger part of our populations to be inwardly democratic in our self-governance, and the frameworks for comprehending our own inner diversities of needs and dreams which inform it; by the ecology of our passions, and our best service of those passions, in their diversity and range, by our logics and rationales (to put it in the Humean terms you favor).
This is extremely well-argued and very quotable. It's a basic primer on what's what.
What you don't take on is the way to proceed that I keep urging, which is to raise humanity's awareness to being the cooperative, altruistic species that would be the fulfillment of what's in our design, and would put us in a position to come up with what to do.
What your readers can do is become my readers -- all free. I am dealing with the need to shift the zeitgeist from hurting one another to helping one another, with the time for doing that being now! My latest:
"Coming up with what to do. First unite us in how real the peril is."
“A generation doing everything right, discovering every promise was a lie.”
Every promise made by the Republican Party and the oligarchs (not just tech oligarchs, but others as well, like the Waltons and Uihleins) was a lie - though the latter is a creation of the former, through undermining the laws and regulations that maintain the “free market” and replacing it with regulatory capture and monopolies, and undermining the voice of the people by equating money from those same oligarchs with speech.
By and large, the Democratic Party has not lied - Clinton reduced the deficit and debt without adverse impact on American workers, the Affordable Care Act made health care available to millions of Americans, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was creating jobs for millions of Americans while propelling us into the 21st century before the Republicans trashed it all.
Unfortunately, the policies of the Democratic Party lifted all people, while a plurality of the country wanted policies that would lift only one segment of the population over all others, and now here we are facing autocracy, oligarchy, and fascism.
My understanding is that on the whole the effects of NAFTA were better than throwing darts to determine each day’s tariffs on each foreign nation. What really moved the dial was an abject failure to enforce the Sherman Antitrust and similar Acts and allow unlimited corporate mergers and the Citizens United decision, both of which were practically the support beams for the Republican Party platform.
This was really thought provoking. I do think many of us on the left may have been lying to ourselves that all the people who voted from Trump are misinformed, have drunk the Kool-Aid, or are just stupid — despite knowing plenty of people who just don’t fit into that framework. But, your position gives us a different way of looking at them — as people who see the system as so broken, it needs a strong hand to blow it up and start over. I spoke to a MAGA person on line and said, you know, what you are saying is unconstitutional, so you’s have to give that up. And he responded Doh, what did you think I meant?
Mike states we are heading toward a clash of civilizations, and that this is a "clash between incompatible visions of how humans should organize themselves."
How humans should "organize" themselves is a valid question. How humans should treat each other in a global society on a planet with limited resources, and in the scarred environment of what prior societies have left us are other issues, which I believe are more fundamental and existential.
When we elect presidents and those in power who are not of moral fiber, who do not see the one-ness of a planet and its people, and to whom the concepts of legacy, unity and vision are foreign words, we have what we've got - discord, greed, enmity, despair, and a dire prognosis of the future.
I absolutely do not see a dearth of jobs or positions that would allow meaningful employment. I do not see any threat of AI or technical advances-- but with the caveat that their direction should be to fix the Earth, to promote integrity in all of its manifestations: health, happiness, and an answer to man's search for meaning in life.
Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam.
Documented use of the term "tikkun olam" dates back to the Mishnaic period. Subsequently, in medieval times, Kabbalistic literature began broadening use of the term. Modern movements of Judaism have expanded the terms to include "the thesis that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large". Well, tikkun olam is not going to fix the world if only Jews are at the helm. All peoples must come to the forefront of such a monumental movement.
The song "What the world needs now is love" could also be expressed as We need LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) for the world to be the change we wish to see.
I easily can envision millions employed to clean the streets and the seas of the garbage we have strewn. I can see millions working in an industry that creates community-size molten salt reactors (MSRs) that do not have the same horrendous side effects of uranium-based reactors. I can envision nursing schools, medical schools generating 10-fold the number of those in medicine to help heal the sick. I can envision millions involved in Earth Sciences to teach us how to properly use the land, rivers, lakes and mountains and retain their beauty but allow them to be productive for millennia. I envision millions of the so-called elderly, like myself, becoming mentors or guides for the younger generations who have not gained the perspective to truly know the rapidity of their time on earth, and the importance of integrity in all that is.
I am sure that each one of you who has read this far has some ideas about what needs to be done to leave this world in a better place than how we found it. But think of this:
Everything in this uni-verse is interconnected. This integration, better worded as "integrity" is reflected in all the biologic and spiritual connections occurring within the human mind-body complex. When the individual has such "integrity" they are in a state of health. When such integrity exists between two people, we have love. When a community works with this oneness, we have a society. When peoples of the world learn this, they have arrived at-one-ness which is called world peace.
Until then, we in America are, more or less, a tower of Babel, ruled by a tyrant spewing out hatred and discord. We need to ask ourselves, and often, who we are, what we are and why we are here.
I loved this! The ways in which we define “work” and conceptualize “gainful employment” - I could feel my mind break open. Yes to all of those things. But if any of us want to have any chances at redefining existence we have to pull together NOW, and by many more than 7 million strong. I’m so proud of us I can’t stand it, but there’s no time to rest!!
I upgraded to paid today. We are evolving in same direction, citizens or subjects, self-governance or rule by those who claim superior qualifications. (My brain uses fewer words.)
So many good points here! And here is just one: "Expertise should inform democratic choice, not replace it. We need experts to explain implications and trade-offs, to provide analysis of what different paths would achieve."
But this itself requires a public educated and informed with the critical thinking skills to understand the explanations. Fifty years of gutted public education makes this a very steep uphill challenge
You walked out of the temple of spreadsheets and finally saw the idol. Respect.
This is the line that matters: citizens or subjects. Technocracy didn’t fail by being dumb. It failed by being value-blind. GDP can rise while dignity falls.
“Feudalism with better UX” is still feudalism. Network states are HOA meetings with venture funding. Blockchain serfdom is still serfdom, just itemized.
Experts should inform. People should decide. Build the democratic muscles: real wages, real training, real public goods, real worker power. Metrics serve humans or they’re just liturgy for extraction.
I get the gist of what you're saying, Mike. The comments about what GDP measures resonated with me because as a climate policy advocate it flabbergasted me to realize that when a "natural" disaster strikes, the cost of relief and rebuilding activities, even though borne by the public, actually increases GDP!
One thing I would add is that if we are to reorient ourselves toward the essence of democratic governance, it's vital that the public is able to discern the truth about the state of affairs. That can only be done if the "information industry" -- the media -- functions as it should. It's certainly not doing so now, mostly because it prioritizes profit for owners and advertisers -- exactly the kind of corporate decision-making you've seen in the tech world.
But of course that's only a portion of the sickness plaguing our information ecosystem. In any case, success of democracy is deeply dependent on the voters being able to evaluate their personal conditions and struggles in the context of the whole of society. Only in this way can the People avoid choosing scoundrels to govern them, as we've now done.
Philosophers who have written about the Christian roots of democracy include Jacques Maritain, Alexis de Tocqueville, Larry Siedentop, and Henri Bergson, among others. These thinkers argue that democracy is deeply shaped by Christian ideas of human dignity, equality, and the common good, and that many democratic principles originate or find their strongest foundations in the Christian tradition.
Bingo! Beautiful! That's the clash we should be talking about! And btw, Yarvin and Theil may be brilliant in their own way and hugely successful businessmen, but they are still fringe cranks. But more to the point, in my view, is that they are emotional dwarfs, and I credit lousy parenting with their wayward orientations. That explains a lot. It's a "rich" tradition, shame on us for falling for it.
They have no right to the fortunes (dumb luck, well-played) overlording the rest of us. If the economy were owned publicly, we would not be in these straits, and they would still be successful, maybe even admired (it may take a few generations to figure out exactly how to do this, but that's the crux of it! Good "leaders" are still blind to this urgency). It's time to puzzle out the proper clash, not be confused and diverted by the false one. They have used this same ruse for the same centuries.
Truly excellent articulation of the existential crisis we face, Mike. It would be even more influential, I imagine, if you should tighten it up into a shorter version.
Y'mean by running it through a LLM AI? 😉
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
"Their framework literally cannot process regime change. They can optimize within systems but can’t recognize when systems themselves are under attack."
This is the key insight into why Democratic Party officials are, for the most part, paralyzed. There is another reason, though. Liberals technocrat elites control the party, and are aligned with corporate donors, rather than their constituents. Economists have been decrying the destruction of the middle class, and the complete cessation of economic mobility between classes, for decades. The middle class didn't evaporate; they were pushed down into the lower two income quintiles, essentially creating two economic classes in the US; the working poor, and the wealthy. The Democratic Party elite knows this full well, and it is the reason they made a conscious decision to abandon rural voters in the heartland, and shift their platform from economic issues to DEI policies. DEI matters hugely to a small minority of Americans, and has served to distract coastal well-off liberals from the increasingly dire economic situation of the majority of Americans. The far right Republicans, and the liberal elite Democrats, collaborated on creating the policy vacuum that allowed the rise of "populism", which has in turned been weaponized by neo-fascist MAGAs.
I was a Nordic libertarian once and your writing reminds me a lot of my own crisis many years ago. But for me it was much easier to find a path I think because having grown up in Scandinavia I got a see a system that works.
Social democracy really works, but it was not clear to me as a libertarian why it worked because like you I took the heavy date oriented path early in life.
The idea of social democrats is that society is always a fight between different stake holders. Liberals just see individuals. Social democrats see whole groups with different interests and try to balance the power of those groups: the corporations, the workers, the environmentalists, the common people, the rich, women, men, minorities, the majority, farmers, the urban people. These are different groups of people and often we can belong in many overlapping groups.
The social democratic vision of Democracy is a form of stakeholder democracy where one tries to balance these stakeholders and the American liberal tradition has done no such thing. It has ignored that one group has take disproportionate large share of power and wealth and that has created a massive imbalance in the system.
Here are some things to consider, that many are not aware of about the Nordic model: The trust levels have one up. Let me repeat that. Norwegians today trust each other MORE today than in the past. A whopping 70% believe other people can be trusted. That has occurred despite mass immigration. More people in Norway today are foreign born than in the US in 2025. It doesn't mean immigration doesn't cause problems. We cannot keep going like this.
But I mention this to emphasize the Nordic trust is an outcome of POLICY and not homogeneity. We deliberately pushed to reduce inequalities between social classes but also genders. The result is that people trust each other more. That means people trust government and institutions more.
It is important point to mention because many Americans think what America is going through is a universal reality produced everywhere due to modernity itself. But Nordic countries are very modern societies with people working tech jobs, surfing the internet, using their smart phones just like the US. Yet societal outcomes are totally different. It goes to show that politics matters. We are not helpless flowing in a particular direction due to technology and economic change. We end up where we are because of important political choices taken or not taken by society.
Nordics are not liberal societies. They are social democratic. Meaning a very strong emphasis has been placed on groups rather than just individual freedom. Emphasis has been on creating a society for the common people. Outcomes has mattered just as much as opportunity.
But we also see challenges. It is why I am a democratic socialist. We have also seen a gradual push towards a more liberal model away from the social democratic model and I fear we will face an American future if we keep going down that path.
Democracy begins within. Integral to the clash you've well-described is the psychological internalization of autocracy, particularly by the religious fundamentalists -- part of why the drive to feudalism is so deeply tied to the evangelical and hard-right Catholic movements. Their fundamental premise is autocracy at every scale, from within the individual, to the family, and on up. Thiel and Vance, and the Supreme Court majority, are such religionists.
We also see the recent popularity of sci-fi and fantasy set in past and future feudal cultures, where the drama is about which of the royal contenders is truly favored by the fates and the cleverness of their schemes. The book covers in the sci-fi/fantasy section are given over to such royalist fantasies, rather than the technology-enabled futures of a half-century back, with current depiction of tech now largely relegated to cyberpunk steampunk retro fantasies.
For our societies to be democratically self-governing, we need the larger part of our populations to be inwardly democratic in our self-governance, and the frameworks for comprehending our own inner diversities of needs and dreams which inform it; by the ecology of our passions, and our best service of those passions, in their diversity and range, by our logics and rationales (to put it in the Humean terms you favor).
This is extremely well-argued and very quotable. It's a basic primer on what's what.
What you don't take on is the way to proceed that I keep urging, which is to raise humanity's awareness to being the cooperative, altruistic species that would be the fulfillment of what's in our design, and would put us in a position to come up with what to do.
What your readers can do is become my readers -- all free. I am dealing with the need to shift the zeitgeist from hurting one another to helping one another, with the time for doing that being now! My latest:
"Coming up with what to do. First unite us in how real the peril is."
https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/coming-up-with-what-to-do
“A generation doing everything right, discovering every promise was a lie.”
Every promise made by the Republican Party and the oligarchs (not just tech oligarchs, but others as well, like the Waltons and Uihleins) was a lie - though the latter is a creation of the former, through undermining the laws and regulations that maintain the “free market” and replacing it with regulatory capture and monopolies, and undermining the voice of the people by equating money from those same oligarchs with speech.
By and large, the Democratic Party has not lied - Clinton reduced the deficit and debt without adverse impact on American workers, the Affordable Care Act made health care available to millions of Americans, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was creating jobs for millions of Americans while propelling us into the 21st century before the Republicans trashed it all.
Unfortunately, the policies of the Democratic Party lifted all people, while a plurality of the country wanted policies that would lift only one segment of the population over all others, and now here we are facing autocracy, oligarchy, and fascism.
My understanding is that on the whole the effects of NAFTA were better than throwing darts to determine each day’s tariffs on each foreign nation. What really moved the dial was an abject failure to enforce the Sherman Antitrust and similar Acts and allow unlimited corporate mergers and the Citizens United decision, both of which were practically the support beams for the Republican Party platform.
Upgrading to paid Mike. I am grateful for your analysis but more grateful for your humanity.
🙏
This was really thought provoking. I do think many of us on the left may have been lying to ourselves that all the people who voted from Trump are misinformed, have drunk the Kool-Aid, or are just stupid — despite knowing plenty of people who just don’t fit into that framework. But, your position gives us a different way of looking at them — as people who see the system as so broken, it needs a strong hand to blow it up and start over. I spoke to a MAGA person on line and said, you know, what you are saying is unconstitutional, so you’s have to give that up. And he responded Doh, what did you think I meant?
Mike states we are heading toward a clash of civilizations, and that this is a "clash between incompatible visions of how humans should organize themselves."
How humans should "organize" themselves is a valid question. How humans should treat each other in a global society on a planet with limited resources, and in the scarred environment of what prior societies have left us are other issues, which I believe are more fundamental and existential.
When we elect presidents and those in power who are not of moral fiber, who do not see the one-ness of a planet and its people, and to whom the concepts of legacy, unity and vision are foreign words, we have what we've got - discord, greed, enmity, despair, and a dire prognosis of the future.
I absolutely do not see a dearth of jobs or positions that would allow meaningful employment. I do not see any threat of AI or technical advances-- but with the caveat that their direction should be to fix the Earth, to promote integrity in all of its manifestations: health, happiness, and an answer to man's search for meaning in life.
Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam.
Documented use of the term "tikkun olam" dates back to the Mishnaic period. Subsequently, in medieval times, Kabbalistic literature began broadening use of the term. Modern movements of Judaism have expanded the terms to include "the thesis that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large". Well, tikkun olam is not going to fix the world if only Jews are at the helm. All peoples must come to the forefront of such a monumental movement.
The song "What the world needs now is love" could also be expressed as We need LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) for the world to be the change we wish to see.
I easily can envision millions employed to clean the streets and the seas of the garbage we have strewn. I can see millions working in an industry that creates community-size molten salt reactors (MSRs) that do not have the same horrendous side effects of uranium-based reactors. I can envision nursing schools, medical schools generating 10-fold the number of those in medicine to help heal the sick. I can envision millions involved in Earth Sciences to teach us how to properly use the land, rivers, lakes and mountains and retain their beauty but allow them to be productive for millennia. I envision millions of the so-called elderly, like myself, becoming mentors or guides for the younger generations who have not gained the perspective to truly know the rapidity of their time on earth, and the importance of integrity in all that is.
I am sure that each one of you who has read this far has some ideas about what needs to be done to leave this world in a better place than how we found it. But think of this:
Everything in this uni-verse is interconnected. This integration, better worded as "integrity" is reflected in all the biologic and spiritual connections occurring within the human mind-body complex. When the individual has such "integrity" they are in a state of health. When such integrity exists between two people, we have love. When a community works with this oneness, we have a society. When peoples of the world learn this, they have arrived at-one-ness which is called world peace.
Until then, we in America are, more or less, a tower of Babel, ruled by a tyrant spewing out hatred and discord. We need to ask ourselves, and often, who we are, what we are and why we are here.
I loved this! The ways in which we define “work” and conceptualize “gainful employment” - I could feel my mind break open. Yes to all of those things. But if any of us want to have any chances at redefining existence we have to pull together NOW, and by many more than 7 million strong. I’m so proud of us I can’t stand it, but there’s no time to rest!!
I upgraded to paid today. We are evolving in same direction, citizens or subjects, self-governance or rule by those who claim superior qualifications. (My brain uses fewer words.)
🙏
So many good points here! And here is just one: "Expertise should inform democratic choice, not replace it. We need experts to explain implications and trade-offs, to provide analysis of what different paths would achieve."
But this itself requires a public educated and informed with the critical thinking skills to understand the explanations. Fifty years of gutted public education makes this a very steep uphill challenge
You walked out of the temple of spreadsheets and finally saw the idol. Respect.
This is the line that matters: citizens or subjects. Technocracy didn’t fail by being dumb. It failed by being value-blind. GDP can rise while dignity falls.
“Feudalism with better UX” is still feudalism. Network states are HOA meetings with venture funding. Blockchain serfdom is still serfdom, just itemized.
Experts should inform. People should decide. Build the democratic muscles: real wages, real training, real public goods, real worker power. Metrics serve humans or they’re just liturgy for extraction.
I get the gist of what you're saying, Mike. The comments about what GDP measures resonated with me because as a climate policy advocate it flabbergasted me to realize that when a "natural" disaster strikes, the cost of relief and rebuilding activities, even though borne by the public, actually increases GDP!
One thing I would add is that if we are to reorient ourselves toward the essence of democratic governance, it's vital that the public is able to discern the truth about the state of affairs. That can only be done if the "information industry" -- the media -- functions as it should. It's certainly not doing so now, mostly because it prioritizes profit for owners and advertisers -- exactly the kind of corporate decision-making you've seen in the tech world.
That's why I wrote my post "Feeding the Propaganda Machine" (https://citizen99.substack.com/p/feeding-the-propaganda-machine?r=2sauq) about where the incentives that drive campaign spending really lie.
But of course that's only a portion of the sickness plaguing our information ecosystem. In any case, success of democracy is deeply dependent on the voters being able to evaluate their personal conditions and struggles in the context of the whole of society. Only in this way can the People avoid choosing scoundrels to govern them, as we've now done.
Philosophers who have written about the Christian roots of democracy include Jacques Maritain, Alexis de Tocqueville, Larry Siedentop, and Henri Bergson, among others. These thinkers argue that democracy is deeply shaped by Christian ideas of human dignity, equality, and the common good, and that many democratic principles originate or find their strongest foundations in the Christian tradition.
This was a great article. Many salient points. But neglects the undeniable blessings that have come from people throughout practising
Bingo! Beautiful! That's the clash we should be talking about! And btw, Yarvin and Theil may be brilliant in their own way and hugely successful businessmen, but they are still fringe cranks. But more to the point, in my view, is that they are emotional dwarfs, and I credit lousy parenting with their wayward orientations. That explains a lot. It's a "rich" tradition, shame on us for falling for it.
They have no right to the fortunes (dumb luck, well-played) overlording the rest of us. If the economy were owned publicly, we would not be in these straits, and they would still be successful, maybe even admired (it may take a few generations to figure out exactly how to do this, but that's the crux of it! Good "leaders" are still blind to this urgency). It's time to puzzle out the proper clash, not be confused and diverted by the false one. They have used this same ruse for the same centuries.