- Will Substack be the Royal Society of the 21st century?
- While Trump and MAGA wage war on the future;
- Robert Reich on *why* Trump and his regime want to destroy every institution in America;
- And my running theme about the conflict between human nature and the modern world.
The ongoing story about science fiction is how it’s a vehicle for understanding humanity in a changed environment. As I’ve been saying recently… And so I find this kind of thing interesting.
Big Think, Peter Leyden, 21 May 2025: Why Substack will be the intellectual engine of the 21st century, subtitled “The platform is a digital Royal Society for today’s greatest minds — and it could play an essential role in shaping the next civilization.”
Key Takeaways
• The following is an installment from Peter Leyden’s “The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050,” an essay series published on Substack and Freethink. • The series roughs out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world. • In this op-ed, Leyden argues that Substack, like the Royal Society during the Enlightenment, could become the hub where a new generation of independent thinkers helps design the future.
Beginning:
The last time humans created a new civilization was during The Enlightenment, the period of time from about 1680 to 1800 that gave birth to many of the core technologies, economic systems, and government institutions that led to the modern world.
My last essay laid out how the people of that time created six mega-inventions that changed the world in fundamental ways: mechanical engines, carbon energies, the Industrial Revolution, financial capitalism, representative democracy, and nation states.
Each of those mega-inventions has a direct parallel that has emerged or is emerging in our world today, as you can see in the graphic below. They are artificial intelligence, clean energies, the biological revolution, and what might soon come to be known as sustainable capitalism, digital democracy, and global governance.
I’m going to treat this like the blurb of a book that sounds interesting but which I’m not inclined to read at the moment. A lot of other books in the queue.
The coincidence is that I have, in fact, begun to follow more and more people — let’s say, intellectuals, from Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman, to recently Richard Dawkins and Jesse Bering — on Substack. You can read most of their posts for free, though posters usually offer subscriber-only content, and in fact some of them make a significant income from such subscribers. (We mentioned that about Heather.) And in fact I just subscribed to Robert Reich’s Substack, to read one particular post today (linked below). $30/year.
I’d rather read books, though, rather than daily sound-bites, which are harder to keep track of. But it can take a couple years for a writer to put out a book, while they can post their very latest thoughts on a Substack every single day. And I think that’s what the allusion to the Royal Society (or a literary salon) is about.
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Meanwhile, of course, Trump and MAGA are waging war on the future. Stop the world and return me to my childhood!
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 21 May 2025: The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future [gift link]
It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.
This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.
In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.
Third: “against a sustainable climate future.” …
The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.
With details and examples.
One war, four fronts. The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it.
In service of what, exactly? What vision does the MAGA movement have instead?
Here, an interesting debate has unfolded.
Citing discussions by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (it’s about “monstrous, supremacist survivalism”), Adam Tooze (on Substack), and John Ganz.
With this summary part-way through.
Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.
I find that last sentence fascinating, and revealing. (“Energies”?) It’s significant to me that virtually none of these political commentators invoke evolution, or even human nature in the modern environment, as a deep cause. And that’s a testament, I think, to the American rejection of science in favor of religion, that continues to hobble even thinkers like these.
To say again: The thing is, there will *always* be people like this. It’s part of human nature, it’s part of the range of human sensibilities and intelligence. (Diversity.) Every century or two an enlightened minority builds a structure to overcome the prejudices of the masses, and that structure lasts for a while… until it’s eroded or deliberately brought down in a return to tribal authoritarianism or autarchy, which most people actually prefer. As is happening now.
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Here is Robert Reich responding to the Thomas Edsall piece I discussed yesterday.
Robert Reich, 21 May 2025: [gift link, I think]
Reich quotes Luttig.
I’m not questioning Luttig’s conclusion. There’s far too much evidence for it. But the deeper question remains: Why do Trump and his regime — and Republicans in Congress who are complicit with them — want to destroy every institution in America?
Tempted to quote it all, but I shouldn’t. Just the first line or two of each item, perhaps…
- Personal demons are driving this. Trump is a pathological narcissist who doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. His only goals are money and power. …
- Trump and his inner circle believe it’s necessary. A second possibility is that they genuinely believe that the nation is so corrupt, ossified, stagnant, and incapable of being reformed that every major American institution must be destroyed in order to make way for a wholly new and superior system. …
- Russia and/or other foreign powers are behind this. Vladimir Putin must be jubilant about the destruction of America. Xi Jinping is likely to be no less pleased. Add in Kim Jong Un, Ali Khamenei, and other global thugs and you have a plethora of forces that could be behind this. …
- The oligarchic titans of corporate America and the super-wealthy are behind this. As wealth and power have moved to the top of America, the corporate titans and super wealthy who have been aggregating them don’t want to lose them to a majority of Americans who could — if given the chance — take them away. …
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There’s always more. Linus is playing with his toy.
