Tech Progress in Weimar America
Brooding thoughts and a preview of my next article.
In the spring, the Trump administration was hustling men away to a prison in El Salvador, skirting—if not openly defying—judicial efforts to halt the practice. I wrote, then, about the perils of authoritarianism and a possible constitutional crisis.
By summer, the administration had backed off. The (immediate) emergency passed. Meanwhile, the opposition party seemed increasingly uninterested in meeting the Trumpist challenge to liberal democracy. Lacking an articulate defense of the Constitution—a document it neither esteems nor even really understands—it clung to its familiar toxic identity politics, torching the odd Waymo for punctuation. My first hope is that we preserve our constitutional republic. Close behind it is my hope that we do not abandon technological progress, especially in AI. Lately, the Left seems like a write-off on this front. Feeling blackpilled about progressives’ ability to do anything but intensify division and decline, I wrote about how the tech industry might maintain an uneasy alliance with the Right—if only out of self-preservation.
Now the leaves are turning, and Nick Fuentes, that Holocaust-denying bottom-feeder, is on my mind. Tucker Carlson’s decision to align with Fuentes in a recent interview is bad. The decision of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, to bless that alignment in a video on X is worse. This (further) moral disintegration on the Right heralds a grim future indeed. As Rod Dreher observes, the relentless decay of the political center is taking us toward Weimar.
At the moment, I don’t know what to write. It feels as though there’s nowhere left to turn. The central question now, I suppose, is one of institutional health. I recently read Nicholas Wade’s excellent The Origin of Politics. Societies survive, Wade notes, when their institutions serve the broad functions of defense, justice, commerce, and religion. Institutions captured by narrow interests, parochial views, infighting, magical thinking, and general decadence are dysfunctional. In evolutionary terms, societies that fall into this sort of dysfunction are unlikely to endure. Yet our culture-war factions, left and right, are consumed with using institutions against internal enemies. They’re not thinking about collective survival.
My (I hope fleeting) despair has led me, oddly enough, to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, that boastful account of liberal democracy’s triumph in the late twentieth century. (Confession: I’d never read it before.) Early on, Fukuyama explains why the great ideological rivals to liberal democracy failed. They suffered a “failure of legitimacy—that is, a crisis on the level of ideas.” The governing elite lost confidence in themselves and in their system. Loss of legitimacy and corrosion of belief produce fragility. From there, any serious policy failure can precipitate “an overturning of the regime itself.” Sound relevant? To the extent our “liberal establishment” remains a governing elite, it is an embattled and exhausted one, blown this way and that by the wind. We may simply be waiting for the triggering failure—an economic shock or a spiral of violence—to carry us somewhere very dark.
In this context, allow me to preview (below) the article I wrote this summer, which appears in the autumn print issue of City Journal, and which will be online soon. In my original draft, I stated my disapproval of Trump more openly. The editors removed that, as was their right; but I can register it here. I suspect that some who loathe Trump will still find the article distasteful. All I can say is that a citizen should, at times, grapple with the complex and unsavory retail political disputes of his day. For all my dislike of Trump and Trumpism, moreover, I remain invested in debates over the future of American conservatism. The impetus for the piece was straightforward: I do not want the Republican Party to turn against artificial intelligence and technological progress. Doing so would be an act of deep societal self-harm.
As a result of the article, I was invited to sign the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles—a celebration of what makes America successful. I’m glad to affirm the value of liberty and prosperity, of federalism and the rule of law, of families and religious freedom, of immigration (yes—with qualifications) and racial equality. The statement is a reminder that all is not lost. Let us pray for a new dawn.
This summer, J. D. Vance, continuing his effort to connect with young American men, appeared on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. After joking with Von about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s supposed fondness for sparkling orange Celsius energy drinks, Vance turned to an “AI moratorium” moving through Congress. The proposal would have barred states from enacting AI-specific regulations, while leaving general protections—like fraud statutes—untouched. “I could kinda go both ways on this,” Vance said. On the one hand, the ten-year moratorium would stop states like California from imposing woke rules on the fast-moving technology. On the other, states like Tennessee should have the power to regulate AI to protect the publicity rights of country music artists.
Vance was being diplomatic. Outside the rarified air of a Theo Von podcast, however, the debate had grown heated. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick praised the moratorium—by then shortened to five years—for “counter[ing] attempts by Gavin Newsom to impose a divisive, race-based AI agenda nationwide.” Meantime, activist lawyer Mike Davis, on Steve Bannon’s War Room, blasted the measure as an “AI amnesty” for “trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists.” In the end, the moratorium was stripped—by a 99–1 vote—from the Trump administration’s omnibus bill, with Bannon and Davis reportedly instrumental in the outcome.
As the Wall Street Journal observed, the episode “exposed the deep divisions between the pro-tech and MAGA wings of the Republican Party.” The moratorium fight was not merely a personality spat, like the falling-out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but a clash of visions. One side, the tech Right, champions growth and discovery; the other, the populist Right, stresses heritage and cultural values. This rift is likely to resurface in future AI battles, as well as in disputes over tariffs, immigration, autonomous vehicles, cloud seeding, lab-grown meat, prenatal testing, and longevity research.
According to techno-optimist researcher Adam Thierer, the moratorium dispute signals a shift in how many conservatives view innovation. In hindsight, the divide has been hardening for years. Clashes abound: Vivek Ramaswamy ousted from the Department of Government Efficiency for pushing a merit-based H-1B system; Bannon posing with Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcer; columnist Ross Douthat asking Peter Thiel whether he is building tools for the Antichrist.
Meanwhile, as the Right squabbles, darker forces gather on the Left. The Democratic Party, despite its 2024 defeat, remains captive to its most strident activists, and consumed by identity politics and redistribution. Many progressives express sympathy with political violence, as was disturbingly evident in reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September. Their worldview is increasingly dour, apocalyptic, illiberal—hostile to growth and technological progress, no less than to Christianity and national pride.
The challenge for the Right is to overcome its internal friction on technological progress, which is real enough, but hardly new. Today’s techno-optimists and populists channel, in twenty-first-century form, the two great forces that the political theorist Frank Meyer taught lay at the heart of American conservatism: libertarianism and traditionalism. Each side needs the other, and each can make the other stronger. They “have their roots in a common tradition,” in Meyer’s still-apt words, and “are arrayed against a common enemy.” They must work together or forfeit the future.
To read the full article when it’s out, follow City Journal!