- Speculation on a new world order;
- Tom Nichols on how Trump as abandoned the Western order;
- Reconsidering what business schools promote;
- Fareed Zakaria’s essay;
- How Fox News peddles “fear porn”;
- How the Trump administration is discouraging even legal immigration.
What might this new order be?
NY Times, opinion by Serge Schmemann, yesterday 18 Oct 2026: The Old World Order Is Over. This Is What Could Come Next.
Opening:
By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.
Is that the future of America in the world? An increasingly autocratic, rude and unpredictable superpower guided by populism, rancor and whim? Or will Americans, once Mr. Trump is gone, try to restore the United States as the world’s repository of democratic values and human rights?
Trump has done too much damage to ever return to “normal.” The writer summarizes things that have changed. Then addresses several alternative futures:
- America Makes a Comeback
- We Muddle Along
- Unchecked Decline
Among other ways. Concluding,
The dangers are huge, but the future need not be dystopian. However the old liberal order is viewed, its achievements cannot be denied — or quickly undone. Even as autocracies spread, the yearning for freedom remains strong. Ukrainians have demonstrated an extraordinary determination to stay free; American judges still often stand up to Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the law; journalists the world over risk freedom and even death to report the truth; countries still rush to help others when catastrophe strikes, as they did when floods ravaged Nepal and Tibet in August.
…
In the words of the hymn, the fate of humanity still turns on the decisions that people and nations take “in the strife of truth with falsehood.” They do not always make the wrong choice. The key is not to wait too long.
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On a similar theme. Or maybe the same theme.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 18 Oct 2026: America Is Now an Ally of Russia, subtitled “Donald Trump has abandoned the Western order.”
In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.
Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.
Another long piece. It’s useful to think long-term here. How long has the “Western order” lasted, according Tom Nichols and Heather Cox Richardson and others? Perhaps 75 years? Democracy and its attendant values of equality and rationality might be seen as blips in the long history of humanity that is unavoidably driven by tribal values. Yet humanity keeps creeping upward, one step for every two or three steps that the tribalists drag us back, so there is hope.
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Sometimes it’s worth rethinking things you’ve taken for granted, because you’ve never actually thought them through. Things can improve.
NY Times Magazine, guest essay by Chris Marquis, yesterday 18 Oct: I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.
The writer speaks of his experience.
While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.
These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.
This change can take place in a single semester. Again and again, I have watched students abandon their altruistic intentions, instead becoming consumed by whether to choose careers in consulting or finance and who will land a summer internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.
Because, it seems obvious, business schools are about participating in capitalism, which is about making money — not doing good. Not caring about long-term consequences.
The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization.
The writer has tried countering this trend, teaching a course about “responsible business and sustainability.” And concludes,
This is not enough. One required course cannot redeem the business school model. If anything, teaching it has intensified my disappointment. The course is relegated to the very end of the program — a telling signal of its importance — and amid a growing backlash against sustainability, there is some pressure to reduce or eliminate the class, to appease the customers who now drive decisions in higher education.
Still, the experience has reminded me why abolishing business schools cannot mean abandoning the people in them. The goal is not to write off the students as aspiring selfish capitalists; it is to stop funneling them through a machine that narrows their sense of possibility. Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.
Capitalism is about endless expansion, which cannot go on forever. Sooner rather than later, capitalist societies need to change, to take responsibility for the future.
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Here is Fareed Zakaria reading the essay I linked in Friday’s post
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Because humanity is hobbled by primitive thinking that is unable to account for the modern world.
Once again, Republicans resort to fear tactics.
Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 16 Oct 2026: Fox News is peddling election “fear porn” about Democrats to rescue Republicans
To conservatives, everything they see wrong in the world — i.e. challenges to their traditional values — must be due to things they fear: trans people, immigrants, scientists, and Democrats!
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One more.
NY Times, yesterday 18 Oct 2026: Legal Immigration Fell Sharply Under Trump Policies Adopted Early This Year
The Trump administration cut legal immigration in half early this year with policies blocking visas for immigrants from nearly half the globe.
This is about *legal* immigration. It’s not about legality (or else Trump!) MAGA simply doesn’t want black and brown people immigrating into the US. MAGA is about “making American great again” by making it whiter. White supremacy. It’s part of our inescapable tribal human nature.
