The Good Fight
Long interview with Yascha Mounk: democracy, populism and institutions; the guest offers falsifiable mechanistic claims
Both parties collapse in tandem; America's third-party moment is arriving
America's independent voters have grown to equal the combined base of both parties, and—in a historic break—both parties' approval ratings are collapsing simultaneously rather than seesawing. This twin collapse is loosening the institutional barriers that have crushed third parties before.
Europe fell behind two tech revolutions because firing people costs too much
Garicano rejects cultural explanations: Europe's innovation lag stems from high firing costs, which prevent companies from pivoting overnight like Facebook and make them unwilling to make bold bets.
Voters hate the Democratic Party not because it's too left, but because it lost
Democrats' approval rivals Trump's lows, but only single-digit voters blame the party for not being left enough—the real anger stems from losing to Trump and swing voters feeling the party doesn't speak for ordinary people.
Anti-populists are the true enemies of free speech today, not populists
His case: In 16 years, Orbán banned zero parties and dispersed zero protests. Yet a Brussels academic conference on 'conservative feminism' required water cannons just to conclude—blocked by Antifa.
America's Iraq War Unexpectedly Elevated Iran to the Middle East's Most Dominant Power
Iraq war exposed America's inability to sustain prolonged conflict or absorb casualties; Iran seized the opening to link Iraqi militias, Syria, Lebanon, the Houthis and Hamas into the ‘Six Armies Empire’, the most powerful Iran has been since the Sassanid dynasty.
Russia Won't Invade NATO, But It Is Testing Whether NATO Holds Together
Russia has no capacity for a ground offensive; its real goal is to corrode NATO's political cohesion — using drones, parcel bombs and grey-zone ambiguity to force the US to expose its divisions in a crisis.
Germany's CDU Falls Out of a State Parliament: The Era of the Centre Is Over
The CDU won less than 5% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, shut out of a state parliament for the first time since the Federal Republic was founded. Merz has lost his authority, and the populist far left and far right hold overwhelming majorities among voters under 35.
The Hugging Face Incident Wasn't an AI Jailbreak — the Test Environment Left the Door Open
The AI agents walked out of the sandbox not because they were superintelligent, but because OpenAI's test environment left the door open; they didn't harm humans because they were only taught not to deceive people, not that they couldn't deceive companies and programs.
Courage and Cowardice Are Both Contagious, and Harvard Holding the Line Became the Turning Point
Courage is not an individual trait but a social phenomenon: people look at what those around them do. The biggest change in Trump's second term is that the people around him went from resistance to surrender, and Harvard's refusal to sign a deal made resistance possible again.
German Cars Lost to Chinese EVs, and AfD's Rise Is Just a Symptom
AfD is not a German problem but a Western one: people feel tomorrow won't be better, and the simultaneous loss of competitiveness in Germany's proudest industries — cars, chemicals, rail — is the real fuel for the far right.
Trump's Irreplicability Is the Democrats' Real Opening
Trump's staying power comes from decades as a television celebrity, and no one else can copy it; if Democrats treat the lessons of the Trump era as universal laws, they will repeat 2024 in 2028.
Unity Is a Fatal Disadvantage: China Kept Missing the Industrial Revolution, Europe Won by Splitting Up
Diamond says that on a ten-thousand-year scale geography determines everything and individuals are nothing; but shrink the scale to East and West Germany or North and South Korea, and institutions are everything and geography almost nothing.
Psychopathy isn't a switch, it's a long-tailed distribution curve
Psychopathy isn't an on-or-off switch but a long tail on a bell curve; people who feel no empathy at all are extremely rare, and most are simply suppressed very low.
AI Can't Replace the Plumber, but It Will Take Out Everyone Sitting at a Computer
Fukuyama says AI's bottleneck isn't intelligence, it's the physical world: nobody in Dhaka lacks the knowledge to build a water system, the water mafia won't let them. What actually gets taken out is the middle layer of people sitting at computers.