Gary, I also heard you on Sam Harris discussing why wealthy tech leaders capitulated to Trump.
My work is thinking about this from an incentive structure standpoint driving their acquiescence—-it's not just individual cowardice, it's a system that evolved to reward political loyalty over innovation, extraction over contribution.
When federal contracts, regulatory frameworks, and market access all depend on political positioning rather than competitive merit, tech CEOs optimize for survival by aligning with power.
The moral failure is real, but it's amplified by an economic system that makes appeasement rational.
The piece examines how American tech leadership is poisoned by surveillance associations, why the "freedom technology" narrative collapsed, and what happens when the most powerful technology is built within authoritarian frameworks.
Would value your perspective…you've lived through this dynamic with different authoritarians.
Thank you,
Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
Thank you for this post. I respect and admire President Biden. He gave us four years of peaceful sleep at night. He’s a genuinely concerned and caring human being. It irritates me that t-rump continually mocks Biden, and the press is complicit in its silence ( I’m speaking to YOU too, Jake Tapper!) I’m also angry at Democrats (including Kamala) who threw Biden under a bus. Hubris is not in Biden’s dna. I strongly believe the reason he held on for so long is that in his vast political experience he knew the Democrats’ infighting and their lack of leadership would put it right where it ended up…I’m disgusted with democratic leadership that did this to Biden. He BEAT Trump, he gave us some “peace” and respite from the tangerine tornado,
Yet this huge MAGA halfwit rump Murica cannot move on, cannot lift the chip (nay, LOG!) from their shoulder and will perhaps remain the permanent anal blockage to a dark future.
Exposing Why The Wealth Gap Exists And The Solution
Jon Stewart interview https://bit.ly/4cetaar with A Mechele Dickerson https://bit.ly/3OMGGIB Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream in her book exposes that the middle class after WWII the government created a middle class based primarily in the housing market especially since the 1980’s
The local state and federal politicians have the ability to change course and deconstruct the middle class by simply changing the laws that have so firmly entrenched a middle class that has no upward mobility The current situation is that the middle class has a horizontal view of where they stand but are unable to move upward due to the tribal constraints that are imposed ie blame the tribes ie immigrants for their plight of inability to buy a home(currently new home buyers average age is 40) The upper and lower class economically have been taught to not look upward but horizontally to who is to blame, that a whole lot of wealth is moving upwards
Rules and laws need to be changed in order to begin to attack this extreme wealth gap but also the middle and lower class needs to stop buying the Nazi Republican koolaid and realizing that if they unite horizontally they themselves can effect societal change French Revolution 2.0
The nesting doll metaphor is brilliant — but it flatters Trump with far more power than he actually has.
Khrushchev blaming Stalin wasn't just rhetoric — it was one absolute ruler replacing another within a system designed to have no accountability whatsoever. No independent courts. No free press. No federalism. No separation of powers. The blame cycle mattered in the Soviet Union because there was nothing else. The narrative was the regime.
America is nothing like that. The courts still check executive power. Congress still holds the purse. Federalism constrains what any president can actually do. The press is free to call out every lie in real time — and does. Trump can blame Biden from the podium all night long, and the constitutional machinery keeps grinding the next morning regardless. That's not a system on the verge of Soviet-style collapse. That's republican design working as intended.
I lived through what actual institutional decay looks like. In Argentina, every president blames the last one — Kirchner blamed Menem, Macri blamed Kirchner, Fernández blamed Macri, Milei blames them all. And it matters there, because the institutions are too weak to force accountability independent of the narrative. The blame cycle fills the vacuum where checks and balances should be.
America has no such vacuum. Which means Trump blaming Biden isn't an authoritarian pattern — it's ordinary democratic politics. Clinton blamed Bush Sr. Obama blamed Bush. Biden blamed Trump. The rhetoric is banal precisely because the institutions are strong enough to absorb it.
The real question isn't whether the current president points fingers — they all do. It's whether the institutional architecture holds regardless. And in America, it does. Comparing that to the Soviet Politburo doesn't sharpen the analysis — it distorts it.
DvP: sadly, "US political process" at the top level (Presidency, SCOTUS, legislature) is now "Weekend at Bernie's". The process is dead, but everybody pretends it is still alive, going through pure performance, no substance.
Al Green tried to break that zombie ritual and got thrown out for disrupting it. Got thrown out not for the message (that placard) itself, but for the attempt to break the make-believe, to break the ritual of empty decorum, ritual of statements with no consequence (aside of being false) and mechanistic applause to those statements of no consequence.
There is no political process anymore in the US Congress or Senate, and, sadly, Democrats are complicit in it. If you ever wondered how the Roman Senate looked in the Imperial period, you can watch it now.
Actually, if the US Congress looked like the "Airplane!" scene when all passengers riot in madness, it would be more healthy than that current "Weekend at Bernie's".
The “Weekend at Bernie’s” line is great, but I’d push back on the premise. If the process were truly dead, courts wouldn’t be blocking executive orders, states wouldn’t be suing the federal government, and Al Green would have been arrested rather than escorted out under chamber rules. The fact that there are rules — and consequences for violating them — is the system breathing.
Your Roman Senate analogy is actually closer to my point than yours. The Imperial Senate was messy, compromised, often performative. It also functioned for centuries. Imperfect institutions aren’t dead institutions.
My opinion is that the top federal level of the whole US system is dead. I agree with you that below that top level, the US political system is alive and quite well, which is a great hope.
In Europe, this "the state is not defined/determined only by its top level of hierarchy" was proven many times. With the US, the exceptionalist "it cannot happen here" is now demonstratively wrong, but it does not mean that the whole US is dead. If anything, probably the lower layers of the US civil society are perhaps even more robust than those of European states. Keeping fingers crossed.
Now we're in agreement. The federal level is where the noise is. The system underneath — states, courts, civil society — is where the resilience lives. And that's not an accident. The founders designed it so that the top could malfunction without the whole thing collapsing. Europe centralizes. America distributes. That distribution is the insurance policy.
For the record, I absolutely do not see the "Europe centralizes", as compared with the US.
Local governments are a real thing. This was tested in Poland 2015-23 during a central Polish gov attempt to switch to autocracy. Also, at least in Poland, the justice system is more decentralized than in the US. Lower courts are not bound by the Supreme Court interpretations. This is a lot of headache for the lawyers, but proved to make the system more robust.
It is true that the educational systems are highly centralized. But maybe having each municipality treach it's own version of biology or physics is not that great. Unless we think that deciding size of beams in bridge design by a popular vote will make for the best bridges.
Fair point on local governance within European countries — the Polish example is a strong one, and I should have been more precise.
The centralization I'm referring to is the EU layer. Brussels exercises regulatory authority over 27 member states through a supranational structure that has no equivalent in American federalism. The European Commission proposes legislation, the European Court of Justice overrides national courts, and fiscal policy is increasingly coordinated from the center. Individual countries retain local governance — you're right about that — but they've ceded significant sovereignty upward to a body that most European citizens can't name the leadership of.
And Poland is a salmon swimming against that current — which is exactly why the EU has spent years trying to net it. Rule of law proceedings, funding freezes, Article 7. The best example of European local resilience is a country Brussels has actively punished for exercising sovereignty. That tells you where the centralization pressure actually lives.
America has no equivalent layer. Washington is powerful, but Texas and California can run radically different policy experiments simultaneously with no supranational body above them imposing regulatory harmonization. The states are the experiment. That's the distribution I mean.
Your point about Polish local governments resisting central autocracy actually reinforces the broader argument — resilience lives in the layers closest to the people, not at the top. We agree on that. The question is how many layers sit above them trying to override that resilience.
DvP, your second paragraph suggests you observe this country through rose-tinted glasses. All of your examples of the republican design working as intended are incomplete. Some parts of the design are working as intended at least some of the time. Other parts of the system are missing in action. I would argue that this country does have at least a partial vacuum in the supposed checks and balances.
Fair pushback, Phil. I'm not arguing the system is flawless — no institution is. Courts get politicized. Congressional oversight gets selectively applied. Federalism gets tested.
But "imperfect" and "Soviet Politburo" are not on the same spectrum. That's the distinction I'm drawing. A system where checks and balances work unevenly is still categorically different from a system where they don't exist at all. The question isn't whether American institutions are perfect. It's whether comparing them to a regime with zero independent judiciary, zero free press, and zero separation of powers produces useful analysis — or just dramatic rhetoric.
A partial vacuum and no vacuum at all are very different problems requiring very different diagnoses.
DvP, I think the comparison was to the desired result of the present regime. I think too many of us have seen the regime’s attempts to produce just such a system here. I am glad that it seems they will not succeed, but that remains to be determined.
That’s a much sharper framing than the original analogy — and I think we’re closer to agreement than it looks. Intent to erode and successful erosion are different things, and you’re right that the intent deserves scrutiny. Where I push back is on letting the intent justify the Soviet comparison. Aspiring to authoritarianism within a system designed to resist it produces a very different outcome than authoritarianism within a system designed to enable it. The frustration you’re seeing from this administration is itself evidence that the design is working.
Great piece, thank you.
Gary, I also heard you on Sam Harris discussing why wealthy tech leaders capitulated to Trump.
My work is thinking about this from an incentive structure standpoint driving their acquiescence—-it's not just individual cowardice, it's a system that evolved to reward political loyalty over innovation, extraction over contribution.
When federal contracts, regulatory frameworks, and market access all depend on political positioning rather than competitive merit, tech CEOs optimize for survival by aligning with power.
The moral failure is real, but it's amplified by an economic system that makes appeasement rational.
I even wrote a piece on this:
https://johanuniverseends.substack.com/p/the-world-ahead-2026-part-4
The piece examines how American tech leadership is poisoned by surveillance associations, why the "freedom technology" narrative collapsed, and what happens when the most powerful technology is built within authoritarian frameworks.
Would value your perspective…you've lived through this dynamic with different authoritarians.
Thank you,
Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
The tech sector early on claimed to be a break with Big Oil, Big Tobacco & Big Whatever. Now it's just another Big. Big Tech.
Thank you for this post. I respect and admire President Biden. He gave us four years of peaceful sleep at night. He’s a genuinely concerned and caring human being. It irritates me that t-rump continually mocks Biden, and the press is complicit in its silence ( I’m speaking to YOU too, Jake Tapper!) I’m also angry at Democrats (including Kamala) who threw Biden under a bus. Hubris is not in Biden’s dna. I strongly believe the reason he held on for so long is that in his vast political experience he knew the Democrats’ infighting and their lack of leadership would put it right where it ended up…I’m disgusted with democratic leadership that did this to Biden. He BEAT Trump, he gave us some “peace” and respite from the tangerine tornado,
Wise advice.
Yet this huge MAGA halfwit rump Murica cannot move on, cannot lift the chip (nay, LOG!) from their shoulder and will perhaps remain the permanent anal blockage to a dark future.
Exposing Why The Wealth Gap Exists And The Solution
Jon Stewart interview https://bit.ly/4cetaar with A Mechele Dickerson https://bit.ly/3OMGGIB Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream in her book exposes that the middle class after WWII the government created a middle class based primarily in the housing market especially since the 1980’s
The local state and federal politicians have the ability to change course and deconstruct the middle class by simply changing the laws that have so firmly entrenched a middle class that has no upward mobility The current situation is that the middle class has a horizontal view of where they stand but are unable to move upward due to the tribal constraints that are imposed ie blame the tribes ie immigrants for their plight of inability to buy a home(currently new home buyers average age is 40) The upper and lower class economically have been taught to not look upward but horizontally to who is to blame, that a whole lot of wealth is moving upwards
Rules and laws need to be changed in order to begin to attack this extreme wealth gap but also the middle and lower class needs to stop buying the Nazi Republican koolaid and realizing that if they unite horizontally they themselves can effect societal change French Revolution 2.0
7+ million votes - Biden’s victory margin in 2020. Donnie cannot abide it.
The nesting doll metaphor is brilliant — but it flatters Trump with far more power than he actually has.
Khrushchev blaming Stalin wasn't just rhetoric — it was one absolute ruler replacing another within a system designed to have no accountability whatsoever. No independent courts. No free press. No federalism. No separation of powers. The blame cycle mattered in the Soviet Union because there was nothing else. The narrative was the regime.
America is nothing like that. The courts still check executive power. Congress still holds the purse. Federalism constrains what any president can actually do. The press is free to call out every lie in real time — and does. Trump can blame Biden from the podium all night long, and the constitutional machinery keeps grinding the next morning regardless. That's not a system on the verge of Soviet-style collapse. That's republican design working as intended.
I lived through what actual institutional decay looks like. In Argentina, every president blames the last one — Kirchner blamed Menem, Macri blamed Kirchner, Fernández blamed Macri, Milei blames them all. And it matters there, because the institutions are too weak to force accountability independent of the narrative. The blame cycle fills the vacuum where checks and balances should be.
America has no such vacuum. Which means Trump blaming Biden isn't an authoritarian pattern — it's ordinary democratic politics. Clinton blamed Bush Sr. Obama blamed Bush. Biden blamed Trump. The rhetoric is banal precisely because the institutions are strong enough to absorb it.
The real question isn't whether the current president points fingers — they all do. It's whether the institutional architecture holds regardless. And in America, it does. Comparing that to the Soviet Politburo doesn't sharpen the analysis — it distorts it.
DvP: sadly, "US political process" at the top level (Presidency, SCOTUS, legislature) is now "Weekend at Bernie's". The process is dead, but everybody pretends it is still alive, going through pure performance, no substance.
Al Green tried to break that zombie ritual and got thrown out for disrupting it. Got thrown out not for the message (that placard) itself, but for the attempt to break the make-believe, to break the ritual of empty decorum, ritual of statements with no consequence (aside of being false) and mechanistic applause to those statements of no consequence.
There is no political process anymore in the US Congress or Senate, and, sadly, Democrats are complicit in it. If you ever wondered how the Roman Senate looked in the Imperial period, you can watch it now.
Actually, if the US Congress looked like the "Airplane!" scene when all passengers riot in madness, it would be more healthy than that current "Weekend at Bernie's".
Another DvP — it’s catching on.
The “Weekend at Bernie’s” line is great, but I’d push back on the premise. If the process were truly dead, courts wouldn’t be blocking executive orders, states wouldn’t be suing the federal government, and Al Green would have been arrested rather than escorted out under chamber rules. The fact that there are rules — and consequences for violating them — is the system breathing.
Your Roman Senate analogy is actually closer to my point than yours. The Imperial Senate was messy, compromised, often performative. It also functioned for centuries. Imperfect institutions aren’t dead institutions.
My opinion is that the top federal level of the whole US system is dead. I agree with you that below that top level, the US political system is alive and quite well, which is a great hope.
In Europe, this "the state is not defined/determined only by its top level of hierarchy" was proven many times. With the US, the exceptionalist "it cannot happen here" is now demonstratively wrong, but it does not mean that the whole US is dead. If anything, probably the lower layers of the US civil society are perhaps even more robust than those of European states. Keeping fingers crossed.
Now we're in agreement. The federal level is where the noise is. The system underneath — states, courts, civil society — is where the resilience lives. And that's not an accident. The founders designed it so that the top could malfunction without the whole thing collapsing. Europe centralizes. America distributes. That distribution is the insurance policy.
For the record, I absolutely do not see the "Europe centralizes", as compared with the US.
Local governments are a real thing. This was tested in Poland 2015-23 during a central Polish gov attempt to switch to autocracy. Also, at least in Poland, the justice system is more decentralized than in the US. Lower courts are not bound by the Supreme Court interpretations. This is a lot of headache for the lawyers, but proved to make the system more robust.
It is true that the educational systems are highly centralized. But maybe having each municipality treach it's own version of biology or physics is not that great. Unless we think that deciding size of beams in bridge design by a popular vote will make for the best bridges.
Fair point on local governance within European countries — the Polish example is a strong one, and I should have been more precise.
The centralization I'm referring to is the EU layer. Brussels exercises regulatory authority over 27 member states through a supranational structure that has no equivalent in American federalism. The European Commission proposes legislation, the European Court of Justice overrides national courts, and fiscal policy is increasingly coordinated from the center. Individual countries retain local governance — you're right about that — but they've ceded significant sovereignty upward to a body that most European citizens can't name the leadership of.
And Poland is a salmon swimming against that current — which is exactly why the EU has spent years trying to net it. Rule of law proceedings, funding freezes, Article 7. The best example of European local resilience is a country Brussels has actively punished for exercising sovereignty. That tells you where the centralization pressure actually lives.
America has no equivalent layer. Washington is powerful, but Texas and California can run radically different policy experiments simultaneously with no supranational body above them imposing regulatory harmonization. The states are the experiment. That's the distribution I mean.
Your point about Polish local governments resisting central autocracy actually reinforces the broader argument — resilience lives in the layers closest to the people, not at the top. We agree on that. The question is how many layers sit above them trying to override that resilience.
DvP, your second paragraph suggests you observe this country through rose-tinted glasses. All of your examples of the republican design working as intended are incomplete. Some parts of the design are working as intended at least some of the time. Other parts of the system are missing in action. I would argue that this country does have at least a partial vacuum in the supposed checks and balances.
Also — DvP. I'm stealing that.
DvP, you are welcome to steal it and enjoy using it!
Fair pushback, Phil. I'm not arguing the system is flawless — no institution is. Courts get politicized. Congressional oversight gets selectively applied. Federalism gets tested.
But "imperfect" and "Soviet Politburo" are not on the same spectrum. That's the distinction I'm drawing. A system where checks and balances work unevenly is still categorically different from a system where they don't exist at all. The question isn't whether American institutions are perfect. It's whether comparing them to a regime with zero independent judiciary, zero free press, and zero separation of powers produces useful analysis — or just dramatic rhetoric.
A partial vacuum and no vacuum at all are very different problems requiring very different diagnoses.
DvP, I think the comparison was to the desired result of the present regime. I think too many of us have seen the regime’s attempts to produce just such a system here. I am glad that it seems they will not succeed, but that remains to be determined.
That’s a much sharper framing than the original analogy — and I think we’re closer to agreement than it looks. Intent to erode and successful erosion are different things, and you’re right that the intent deserves scrutiny. Where I push back is on letting the intent justify the Soviet comparison. Aspiring to authoritarianism within a system designed to resist it produces a very different outcome than authoritarianism within a system designed to enable it. The frustration you’re seeing from this administration is itself evidence that the design is working.