T Tuesday, October 14, 2025
1964 Martin Luther King Jr. was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
1986 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, for his efforts to ensure the Holocaust was remembered
1991 Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize
1994 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
2025 Donald Trump awarded himself and Benjamin Netanyahu the Nobel Peace Prize😊
In bed at 9, up at 4:40. I opted to hit the sack after 6 innings of flawless pitching by Blake Snell, missing the thrilling and disappointing bottom of the ninth when the Brewers lost, 2-1. I had a rough night's rest, spending part of the night on the LZB, with pain in my left hip and foot/ankle. My hunch is that my chronic lymphedema will contribute to my eventual death: cardiac, blood clot, something.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 10:30 a.m.
We are living in a dystopia right now. Our children and grandchildren will live in this worsening dystopia when I am gone.
I think back to the days when Jimmy Aquavia and I would smugly and culpably take some comfort in the fact that we are not long for this world, ignoring, temporarily at least, that our loved ones have presumably long lives ahead of them in the world we will leave them. I think back on all the many Cassandra-like predictions I made to Kitty in our early morning conversations, ending them feebly with "I hope I'm wrong," but the evidence of where we were heading, i.e., where we are now, was too strong to be ignored or denied. I think too of the last Republican administration that we had pre-Trump: that of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and George Tenet. It was the era of extraordinary renditions, 'black sites', 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' i.e., torture, and of Abu Ghraib. the U.S. Army prison where Iraqi prisoners were regularly subjected to sadistic, cruel, and illegal treatment by U.S. Army troops. Donald Trump was not the first president, certainly not the first Republican president, to ignore "the rule of law."
More evidence supporting despair is in this morning's NY Times, a column by Tom Edsell, titled "The Rise of Social Media and the Fall of Western Democracy." It opens with these thoughts:
At a recent conference in Spain on polarization, Avila Kilmurray, a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process, reminded the gathering that the Good Friday Agreement received more than 71 percent support in a 1998 referendum. But, she said, “if the vote were held today, with the presence of social media, I don’t think it would pass.”
Kilmurray’s comment goes to the heart of the political, cultural and educational problems prompted not just by social media but also by the growing presence of all kinds of new technologies in our lives, especially artificial intelligence.
Is it even possible to weigh the costs of social media against its benefits? Was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024 one of the costs of social media? Is the rise in right-wing populism in the United States and Europe — accompanied by democratic backsliding in country after country — another cost? On another front of equal importance, has a generation of young men and women, especially young liberal women, suffered heightened levels of depression and anxiety because of social media?
. . .
Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U. who has studied these questions, put the complexities and ambiguities in perspective in an email:
Joseph Goebbels called the radio “the eighth great power” and said, without the radio and the airplane, the Nazis would not have had their successes. But we wouldn’t prefer to be without a free press, the radio or the airplane today.
Despite these cautions, Pildes argued that “Twitter and cable television (also part of the communications revolution), along with the modern use of primary elections rather than political conventions, all played a significant role in Donald Trump’s initial electoral success.”
“There’s no question,” Pildes added, that
new technologies have contributed significantly to the political fragmentation roiling nearly all Western democracies. These new technologies enable more widespread political participation, but they also mean challenges to government action will be easy to mobilize and perhaps continual. The technological revolution has made it more difficult in many ways to deliver effective government, but if governments fail to do so, frustration, anger, distrust and worse will continue to grow.
Other scholars are willing to go a step further in placing blame on technology.
In an Oct. 2 essay posted in Persuasion, “It’s the Internet, Stupid: What Caused the Global Populist Wave? Blame the Screens,” Fukuyama, after nearly a decade of examining the causes of rising global populism, wrote, “I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.”
The advent of the internet, Fukuyama continued,
can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe. The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.
In an email, Fukuyama said that “without the internet, Trump’s whole narrative about the 2020 election would never have gotten any traction.”
Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell and the author of the forthcoming book “The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling Into Disorder,” wrote in an email that the new technologies were collectively disproving the adage that the truth will out:
For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.I am not one of those who believe that Donald Trump has already turned America into a dictatorship. Yet the crossing-over from freedom into authoritarianism may be marked not by a single dramatic event but by the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions—and that corrosion is well under way. For 250 years, the essence of America’s democratic system, drawing on thinkers going back to Cicero and Cato, has been that no one is above the law. Public officials’ first duty is to put the law before the satisfaction of their own selfish impulses. That concept is alien to Trump.Although Trump’s actions across these various spheres may seem like separate policies, they are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years, you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too.
So why are we doing so little? Are we just going to stand in passive witness to the degradation of our democracy?
By this past Spring, . . . I thought the mass civic uprising I was hoping for was at hand. So where is it? . . . But for the most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. Institution after institution cuts deals with the Trump-administration extortion racket. In private, business leaders will complain about the damage Trump is doing—but in public, they are lying low. University presidents were galvanized by Harvard’s initial decision to stand up for itself, but many other schools (including now possibly Harvard) have agreed to pay what are in effect compulsory bribes to the Trump administration.
. . . The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and ’90s produced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West and Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev in the East. Since 2010 or so, the tide of global populism has risen, a movement that has brought us not just Trump, but Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, the revanchist version of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Brexit. Drowning in this historic tide, conventional parties and politicians, whose time horizon doesn’t stretch past the next election, are hapless. Conventional politicians don’t have the vision or power to reverse a historical tide. Chuck Schumer is not going to save us.
Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?
[Trump's] narrative has been persuasive to millions of Americans. Since Trump first declared his candidacy in 2015, some 1,400 American counties have moved in a more Republican direction, while fewer than 60 have moved in a more Democratic direction. Trump used this narrative to build a multiracial working-class coalition; a fifth of all Trump voters in 2024 were people of color.
In the following paragraphs of this very long, very well thought-out essay, Brooks lays out a way forward for what he hopes will be a Progressive-Populist Movement akin to the one that developed at the turn of the 20th century. That movement developed in response to the terrible social and economic excesses of the Industrial Age, the Railroad Age, and the Gilded Age in America. It produced anti-trust legislation and the ICC, the Food and Drug Administration, and other initiatives that fought the concentration of corporate and capitalist power that inhibited social mobility and an economically decent life for the masses of Americans. Can such a coalition movement arise in the Trump Era? Brooks thinks so, and I don't. But as I said so often to my dear sister after some dire observation and prediction, I hope I'm wrong.
[A favorite excerpt from Brook's esaay: "The final of Alinsky’s 13 “Rules for Radicals” was: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Another (the fifth one) was: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
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