Quite a round of doom and gloom essays today. This is where we are.
- The drive toward privatization will lead to feudalism;
- Max Boot on the suicide of a superpower;
- Paul Krugman on how we’re no longer a serious country, as the world is noticing;
- Robert Reich on ignorance and tyranny;
- Jonah Goldberg on how loyalty to Trump is all that matters;
- Two pieces about Elon Musk: “a legacy of disease, starvation and death”;
- Jerry Coyne on how the call for conservative balance in academia is just another version of DEI;
- And the irony of denouncing antisemitism from an administration driven by white supremacy.
This is what those who want the shrink the government by privatizing everything would lead to.
The Atlantic, Cullen Murphy, 3 Jun 2025: Feudalism Is Our Future, subtitled “What the next Dark Ages could look like”
[T]he Middle Ages were supposed to stay where they were. But they have not. With the accelerating advance of privatization, they seem to be moving our way in the form of something that resembles feudalism. Medievalists argue over what that word really means, parsing it with contentious refinement. Was it even understood at the time? Stripped bare, though, the idea is simple enough.
In Europe, as imperial power receded, a new system of organization took hold, one in which power, governance, law, security, rights, and wealth were decentralized and held in private hands. Those who possessed this private power were linked to one another, from highest to lowest, in tiers of vassalage. The people above also had obligations to the people below—administering justice, providing protection. Think of the system, perhaps, as a nesting doll of oligarchs presiding over a great mass of people who subsisted as villeins and serfs.
(After this, in my big picture scheme, came principles of the Enlightenment, including American Revolution and Constitution, designed to overcome the worst aspects of authoritarian human nature.)
The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights.
(It worked for quite a while. Now we’re slipping back.)
In the 1980s and ’90s, privatization started gaining traction again, and it had plenty of help. Anti-government sentiment created opportunities, and entrepreneurs seized them. Privatization was also pushed by policy makers who saw outsourcing as inherently more efficient. And besides, the public sector can’t do everything. Case by case, privatization of this or that may well make sense. The problem comes in the sheer accumulation. In the U.S., even before Trump took office a second time, there were roughly twice as many people employed by private contractors to do the federal government’s business as there were federal employees.
And now the current administration is undoing public control and enriching private entrepreneurs.
Oversight more broadly—of the environment, food, drugs, finance—has been drifting for decades into the hands of those being overseen. In their 2021 book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian documented the loss of public control over water, roads, welfare, parks, and much else. The deliberate dismantling of government in America in recent months, and its replacement with something built on privatized power and networks of personal allegiance, accelerates what was long under way. Its spirit was captured decades ago in a maxim of Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum: “Don’t just stand there— undo something!”
Concluding:
Is feudalism our future? There is no “must” in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn’t have a name yet, and it won’t be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem “Middle.” With contentious refinement, historians will parse what “privatization” might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.
It’s been said that one reason Americans are reluctant to tax the wealthy is because every American secretly hopes he’ll be wealthy one day too. And that is a consequence, ironically, of American’s freedom. Unlike the ancient feudal societies, in American society one *can* change one’s social position, and everyone dreams of it. Yet it doesn’t happen as often as people think. The billionaires mostly inherited their wealth. If it were so easy to work really hard and become a billionaire, why haven’t more people done it?
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Suicide of a superpower.
Washington Post, Max Boot, 3 Jun 2025: We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower, subtitled “The president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower status.”
On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy display of U.S. military power will parade through Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.
But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.
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Paul Krugman, 3 Jun 2025: We Are No Longer a Serious Country, subtitled “And the world is starting to notice”
“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This line is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan. Whoever said it definitely had a point, and not just about politics. If you’re trying to explain to people, be they voters or bond investors, that you aren’t really as bad or untrustworthy as you seem, you’re already in deep trouble.
So when I saw Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, declaring Sunday that “The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” my reaction was, “Uh-oh.”
And it’s not just me. For generations investors have treated U.S. government debt as the ultimate safe asset. Whenever disaster strikes — even if it’s disaster largely made in America, like the 2008 subprime crisis — bond buyers pile into U.S. Treasuries, because America is a serious country, and the idea that we would fail to honor our debts was unthinkable.
But are we still that country? Markets seem to have doubts.
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A point made time and again.
Robert Reich, 3 Jun 2025: Trump’s Vicious Attack on the American Mind, subtitled “He wants America to be ignorant because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny”
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.
And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.
With five facets of attack:
1. Rewrite history
2. Gut education
3. Dismantle science
4. Suppress the media
5. Attack the arts
Do his fans not care? Or (I suspect) they are simply unaware.
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It’s only about loyalty.
LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 2 Jun 2025: Trump shows that loyalty is all that matters to him
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For once, an honest headline.
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 30 May 2025: Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death [gift link]
And another. I won’t quote; links are free.
NY Times, Louise Perry, 3 Jun 2025: How History Will Remember Elon Musk
Summary: not good. Hubris
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Jerry Coyne on how the call for diversity in academia, i.e. that more conservatives should be represented in academia, is “DEI.” That is, conservatives are against DEI when it involves people other than white Christians, but support it to promote themselves.
Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 3 Jun 2025: Should academia practice “political DEI” and hire more conservatives?
Pointing to this Atlantic article from a few days ago:
The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, 27 May 2025: The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun, subtitled “In an effort to attract more right-leaning faculty, some elite universities are borrowing tactics long used to promote racial diversity.”
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One more irony, or hypocrisy.
NY Times, Peter Baker, 3 Jun 2025: Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames, subtitled “President Trump’s effort to punish Harvard over antisemitism is complicated by his extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbols.”
