michael-dean-k/

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.

A "stabilizing fiction" is when the controller tells a lie to controlled to maintain order and spirit. Think about XMAS as a stabilizing fiction between parents and kids. Think about democracy as a stabilizing fiction between rulers and the ruled.

The inauguration is ominous, Among American flutes and tubas, Overdubbed with sportscasters, A Sgt. Pepper’s collage of faces, Clinton, Cook, Bezos, Musk, All the world’s wealth, All the power, An ark of 500, And towering tyrant Baron, Surrounded by portraits, Grown, scared children, Like us,

But of leaders leading the chasm’s cross, Who here are the truly kind? And which have killed? You wouldn’t know, If you witnessed Rome, In high-resolution, In reflective eyes of Elon, Ghosts of founding fathers hover the rotunda, Looking down, like us, the tele-spectators, On soap operas of our civic machine, $MELANIA is here, $1.5 billion, Her memoir ghostwritten, And Christopher croons, As the sitting Skeleton marches through, The cryptic colonnade that holds DC,

Afront the hillbilly with sharp tongue, Cameras zoom: wigged men with pens, Documents that failed us, Stretched to shreds with mutations of, Alien culture and titanic force, But all the old books, The furling rules and conventions, Won’t help where we’re going, There are no acolytes on this American path,

“The President elect Donald J. Trump,” He missed the kiss on his wife’s cheek by an inch, The pleasantries can’t hide the tension, I imagine Jill Biden pulling a pistol, I imagine these petty, ancient quarrels will soon be pale, For the valley is pregnant not with fruits, But secret, ripening, superintelligence, The speaker now quotes Bob Dylan, She speaks at 1,000 bits per second, Like an ant, Except ants can’t lie,

The people run our country? It’s the troops who bomb and rig elections? Since when has democracy transcended its dress? And now we pray, And draw comparisons to biblical heroes, As they swear in JD Vance With smiling wife, And daughter sucking thumb, I imagine a horrible assassination, Of trump’s head exploding, From some CIA sniper, On an off-camera balcony,

Cannons fire when it becomes official, Marchers chant hallelujahs, The dawn of the Golden Age of America, Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, Momentum will annihilate the shadows, God bends bullets to save the patriot, Self-declared: “Liberation day,” “The most consequential day in American history,” “A revolution of common sense,” “The spirit of the next great frontier is written in our souls.”

People often reduce democratic media down to a single criteria—free speech—but it requires more than that. It's not just limiting censorship, but eliminating self-censorship. It's about enabling the citizen, the fundamental unit of the country. Can they speak? Can they control what they see? Are they pressured to towards saying certain things?

Some principles:

• Participation: does everyone post, or is it still a reality show?
• Explicitness of Feed: do you have control/legibility over what you’re being fed?
• Commodity-proof: are you incentivized to converge into a 1D brand?

As someone who doesn’t identify with either party and has voted for both, I’ll have to reflect more on this [an essay of a friend].

There are definitely some exceptions that break a simple dichotomy. For example, a republic of different states can promote more diversity compared to a single globalized entity (it's ironic that Republicans are culturally against diversity, but structurally for it). And if you actually look at what a republic is, I’d say that offloading responsibility via election goes against the republican idea of autonomy.

There’s another interesting thread here on the nature of selfishness. Either end of the spectrum is wicked: I think it devolves into “altruistic” mobs or hubristic self-destruction. Maybe solving this paradox is key: selfish interests that benefit the larger organism.