Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy

I’m skeptical of this on first read. It would take a lot more thinking and some research to decide what parts of it I think are correct. But it’s an interesting piece because (to me at least) it’s a completely novel lens on US politics.

Separate from its ideological composition, the peculiar power of American philanthropy likely weakens U.S. state capacity, creating intrinsic barriers to the left’s vision of social democracy. Sweden and Norway, for example, have some of the lowest rates of nonprofit employment in Europe, rivaled only by former communist countries. Yet they also have some of the highest rates of social capital. The secret seems to be Scandinavia’s rich history of mutual aid, which culminated in universal, publicly administered social programs that crowded out the need for third-party providers, combined with sector-wide collective bargaining agreements that reduced the need for “advocacy without representation.” It’s a legacy that’s recently begun to reverse under what most leftist sociologists would recognize as the dreaded influence of neoliberalism.

In this light, the conflation of “the neoliberal turn” with Reaganomics is about two decades too late. Instead, the regime change that displaced member-led parties and the countervailing power of robust labor unions first started in the mid-1960s, when large foundations swelled on post-war growth and tax avoidance to fill the void. Collective bargaining and machine politics were summarily replaced with a technocratic “policy state.” And what’s a policy state without policy experts? Thus the modern advocate was born.

Needless to say, the results have been mixed.

Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy

The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz

An entertaining and somewhat appalling read:

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/

Anthropic and the right to say no – by Jerusalem Demsas

I think that Demsas, as a highly agentic small business founder, may be conditioning her view of business a bit too strongly on her own experience, but yes, I agree.

…the existence of bad companies has convinced large swaths of the Left to view all private market activity, and even the desire to make a lot of money, as inherently suspect. This is a real shift, under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Democrats openly defended “free enterprise.” Now, instead of expecting the government to proffer a reason why regulation is necessary, corporations and individual actors need to justify their existence to the state on an ongoing basis. This distrust has manifested in an entrepreneurship gap. In one paper, economists find that Republicans are 26% more likely to start a business than Democrats.

The problem isn’t that people distrust corporations, it’s that they’ve allowed that distrust to license a comfort with heavy-handed state power that is far more dangerous than any individual company. If one of the leading-edge tech companies — one potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — cannot require that its products aren’t used to undermine the Constitution, what, really, is corporate power in the face of that?

Anthropic and the right to say no – by Jerusalem Demsas

The Hemisphere of Exceptions | Lawfare

Thoughtful piece on how the normalization of states of emergency has itself become increasingly normalized in the Americas. What can we learn about the risks of such normalization by looking at countries where the process has gone further?

Across [the Americas], this pattern repeats: Emergency powers, once framed as exceptional tools for brief crises, have become central instruments of governance in countries grappling with political instability, organized crime, and eroding public trust. This shift matters not because emergencies themselves are new—every constitutional system allows for extraordinary authority in moments of genuine crisis—but because of how routinely and predictably these powers now appear, reappear, and persist. What was designed as a temporary suspension of ordinary legal and institutional constraints increasingly functions as a parallel mode of rule.

Executives rely on emergency authorities not only to respond to acute threats but also to manage chronic problems that democratic institutions have struggled to resolve. Over time, this reliance reshapes expectations: Legislatures grow accustomed to governing by renewing these executive powers rather than deliberation, courts recalibrate standards of deference, and security forces assume a more permanent role in public life. The result is not the collapse of democracy, but a subtler transformation in how it operates, with legality yielding to expediency and crisis becoming a standing justification rather than an exception. The increasing prevalence of these emergency powers complicates U.S. policy, making it more difficult to recognize democratic backsliding, even as Washington has used similar emergency measures to justify executive action.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-hemisphere-of-exceptions

Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music

Really interesting essay from someone who is himself an excellent and unconventional country musician. It’s a bit too heavily steeped for my taste in the ritualized identity politics of 2020, but still very much worth a read.

The southern accent itself has, puzzlingly, taken on a second life as the voice of universal rurality. Why? Rurality clung on longer in the South than other places because of poverty―a poverty that was the result of the evils of slavery, the destruction of total war, and an ensuing era of brutal white supremacy and economic strife. The destitution of the former Confederacy served to preserve the use of instruments and melodies that were common in every corner of this country, until the tide of industrialization swept over these older music forms almost everywhere else, inadvertently isolating and enshrining the haunting songs of yesteryear in old Dixie.

The forgotten corners of the southeast harbored people singing and playing songs from distant centuries and even more distant continents. The seemingly incongruent traditions of Gaelic Europe, Native America, West Africa, Hawaii, Latin America and French Canada collided to create a kaleidoscope of vernacular music forms that coalesced into what we know today as blues, jazz, ragtime, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass and, yes, country. By the time this music reached the ears of the rest of America in the early 20th century, crackling from primitive phonograph records and fledgling radio stations, these accidentally preserved remnants of speech patterns and musical traditions seemed archaic and novel.

Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music

Dean Ball and deepfates on what programming-for-free gives us

Former White House AI advisor Dean Ball:

Most people, going about their day, do not think about how “causing bespoke software engineering to occur” might improve their lives or allow them to achieve some objective. They think of “software engineering,” when they think of it at all, as something altogether distinct from what they do. Of course if you have deeply internalized the general-purpose nature of “software,” and especially, “things achievable by well-orchestrated computers,” you understand that in some important sense, almost all human endeavor can be aided, in some way or another, by software engineering. A great deal of it can be automated altogether.

Coding agents have reached the point of reliability and quality where it is now possible to cause a great many moderately complex software engineering projects to occur.

[…]

It will take time to realize this potential, if for no other reason than the fact that for most people, the tool I am describing and the mentality required to wield it well are entirely alien. You have to learn to think a little bit like a software engineer; you have to know “the kinds of things software can do.” You have to learn also to think like the chief executive of a thousand small (but fast growing) teams of software engineers who possess expert-level knowledge of virtually all domains of human intellectual life. Grasping all of this, and learning how to embody it, requires humans to adopt a strange and new kind of agenticness. Not all of us will. But some people understand it already, and their numbers will only grow. Young people in particular, blessed with neuroplasticity, will have internalized this to a depth few grownups will be able to comprehend. This transformation will therefore be sociological as well as technological, the revolution cultural as well as industrial.

Dean Ball responding to deepfates responding to Dean