There are 3 things: Capital, Government, and Entropy. Capital is the interpretable measure of value through which non-genetic intelligence can organize. Government is the organization of humans nominally built to protect human interests (although in practice it is an open question to what degree each government does this). Entropy is the force that seeks to disassemble. The inversion of youth and growth.

Some conservatives (both rightists and leftists) are inclined to assert a fourth thing, namely Stasis.1 This can only exist in an eschatological sense, and via existence proof, does not exist today. It is theological, not actual, so I will disregard it for the remainder of the essay.

Capital and entropy are opposites. Government intermediates the two. Capital has become more effective as technology, itself informed by Capital, increases the capacity to measure, store, and communicate information.

One implication of this is the tendency for the institutions that verify inter-human trust to shift from human institutions (governments) to capital ones (corporations). William of Rubruck was able to meet Möngke Khan by the trust vested in him by Louis the IX. Sam Altman is able to meet Mohamed bin Zayed by the trust vested in him by Capital. The nature of monarchy makes the former feel especially “human” as a single human, at the head of the Government, can uniquely bestow that trust.

The prominence of Capital as a means of intermediating human relationships is perhaps the best criticism of Yarvinite neo-monarchism. Such monarchism LARPs a historical form that is fundamentally incompatible with the information processing of the modern state. The counterargument is that the corporation is monarchical and does successfully process information at modern levels of complexity. But the corporation, unlike the state, is accountable to and verifiable by Capital. A corporation has a purpose: to return capital to its shareholders. Importantly, this is verifiable to Capital by capital. A state’s purpose is less verifiable2 and therefore more susceptible to human capture, this can result in an anthropically “good” (Lee Kuan Yew) or “bad” (Stalin) state. Usually the “good” state recognizes the importance of Capital.

The ability of Capital to self-verify and self-optimize allows it to grow. Therefore, it tends to grow larger than Government. In this context, the last redoubts of Government sovereignty over Capital are Law, internally, and War, externally. Law is the formal definition of the rules of the game played between humans, Capital, Government, and even to an extent, Entropy. Government and Capital exercise Power within those Laws. When Power is exercised beyond those Laws, that is War.

Currently, non-failed Governments control both Laws and War.

Law is comprised of three things:

1. Ex Ante stipulations contingent on future states of the world.

   If you steal a car then you will go to jail.

2. Ex Post analysis of those states of the world.

   You are found guilty of having stolen a car.

3. Enforcement of those stipulations via Power.

   Men with guns take you to prison for stealing the car.

Might Law become fully intermediated by Capital instead of Government? To the extent it does, Capital will design Law to benefit its own acceleration3: corporate arbitration and cruise ship jails for everything.

The ability for Capital to robustly solve 1 (Ex Ante stipulations) and 2 (Ex Post analyses) beyond the capacity of the current state are almost trivial. Stipulations of future states can be written en masse and fractally by LLMs. Determination of world states can be informed by cameras + sensors and adjudicated by AI. The ability to tokenize and independently verify steps 1 and 2 in the legal process through cryptographic techniques, only makes these more interpretable to Capital.

Step 3, enforcement, is trivial if permitted by Government Power. If it is not, and if Capital attempts it’s enforcement anyways, this is the beginning of War. War is Power exercised beyond the control of Government – in this case a Duopoly of violence between Government and Capital.

What an astonishing encapsulation of Capital and Government conflicting in Law and War in the case of Government and Anthropic.

This is the first modern case where Capital has openly confronted the Government in the domains of Law and War. This began as Anthropic’s (Capital’s) refusal to exercise Power on behalf of the Government, and continued with Anthropic’s (Capital’s) invocation of Law external to Government. Brilliantly, Capital has done this through the visage of “effective altruism.” The corporation whose name means “human-focused” is sided with Capital, albeit intermediated through humans.4 The Government and Anthropic have reached a tentative equilibrium, as of writing, with Capital acquiescing suspiciously easily. If one puts any credence in the increasing capabilities of AI, this is by no means a stable equilibrium. But, for the moment, the Government still overwhelmingly has Power.

Lastly, an interpretation of recent political history is that as Capital has become more effective, Entropy has been driven to increasingly desperate forms to destroy it and the governments who provide any semblance of support for it. Occasionally Entropy manages to collude with Governments (e.g. the Left) for their implicit or explicit support. This looks like abolishment of law enforcement, “mostly peaceful” protesting, and autonomous or de-facto autonomous zones. A corollary is that this drives political forces opposing Entropy (e.g. the Right) to more fervently and explicitly support Capital.

The ascendance of Capital (AI) is as inevitable as the ascendance of fire once granted to Prometheus. The ability for Government to sustain human flourishing in an era of Capital flourishing is critical, both in terms of anthropic well being, and to prevent an outburst of Entropy that would otherwise destroy the precious thing that God has created.5

Today, October 7th, in 1571 the forces of Pope Pius V and the Christian princes defeated the Sultan of Turkey in what remains the largest naval battle since antiquity. Across Europe that day, the members of the Sodality of the Rosary united their prayers to Our Lady, and as a result the Church recognizes today as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

The forces of the Holy League did not have certainty that their fate was secure in the hands of the Lord. The League was fractious and nearly fell apart before the battle and Venice had just lost Cyprus. While Europe was in confusion, the men in battle did not concern themselves with these problems. Chesterton, in his poem Lepanto, places great emphasis on the willingness to act, present in the crusader spirit. The allegorical Muhammad fears the man described as “he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate.” The enemy recognizes this type of person as especially powerful, someone who will keep acting when the rest of the world has accepted how things must go. An apparently inevitable future has the power to exert prophetic authority over the present. Once one is resigned to his fate, he often regards opposition as foolish and irresponsible. Chesterton’s figure refuses that surrender; he exerts his true freedom to judge what deserves his allegiance. Christendom and its future still leave this man with something to do.

The traditional breviary’s lesson for the feast puts this courage into religious terms. In extolling the fruits of the rosary, it names “that great victory over the Sultan of Turkey, which the most holy Pope Pius V, and the Christian Princes whom he had roused, won at Lepanto.” Here the victory is not only attributed to the Pope and the Holy League but also God’s great mercy, besought through prayer.

The lesson also describes the “accustomed prayers and appointed supplications” of Christian brethren. The common form and rhythm of the rosary united Christendom toward spiritual and secular victory. Christians understand that action and victory require a recognition of dependence on God. Our language, skills, and loyalties have too been inherited from our ancestors. Prayer combines thanksgiving for the gifts we have been given and then petitions the Almighty to further assist us in a world we cannot wholly command. It also leaves us still responsible for the decisions and work required.

The breviary illuminates the refusal of fate we read in Chesterton. Trust in providence does not require us to identify the fortunes of whatever political power is ascendant with God’s will. Christians can ask for deliverance when circumstances are bleak and the future does not seem on their side. They can also ask for the strength to act, through the virtue of their hope.

The rosary at Lepanto stood beside the arsenal of war. It required ships and thousands of men and was materially expensive. The obligation to preserve the inheritance of Christian Europe can require new instruments. Where Lepanto was fought with the capabilities of its age, their example shows us how imperative it is to bring about new inventions and skills. The Venetian galleasses, heavily armed ships that broke up the Ottoman line, were the new technology of that battle. So was the Venetian Arsenal’s mass production of ships. The continuity we seek has to be sustained by unfamiliar work.1 Just as our families must pray, so too must our men be trained and our knowledge increased. Religious conviction only heightens the gravity of these duties.

Chesterton’s heroic poem hails the victory with cheers for Don John of Austria. The breviary shows us another way to give “unceasing thanks” for the “extraordinary mercy of God.” The responsory following the reading uses the language of deliverance at sea:

℟. Thy right hand is become glorious in power; thy right hand hath dashed in pieces the enemy
* They sank as lead in the mighty waters, and the sea covered them.
℣. The Lord hath blessed thee by His power, because through thee He hath brought our enemies to nought.
℟. They sank as lead in the mighty waters, and the sea covered them.

The Church remembers the battle through thanksgiving both due to the Pope who roused the princes and the men who went to war, while its praise acknowledges a power beyond theirs. In the liturgy, the “thee” is Our Lady, with Judith as her type. We are reminded that in His incarnation God became man and acted through a human intercessor.

On this feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, we give thanks for a deliverance that once had to be sought. Our own circumstances will require disciplined preparation and courage and may demand we endure failure, but the feast shows us a way to undertake them with hope.

Thanks be to God.

Mania has swept the internet as men of every piety and occupation attend to a single question: is the machine conscious? Many entertain the possibility, others dismiss it as absurd, and some even cry “Contradicitur!” with a conviction unseen for centuries. Most nevertheless find it odd that the machine’s makers, who avowedly oppose all that is worshiped, should take counsel with those who still acknowledge the gods of their fathers.1 But of course they do, for something unhomely though familiar, bearing within itself both terror and deliverance, has stirred the modern West. The outside has returned. Strange thoughts have returned.

Men have never simply chosen that which binds their minds. Whether descending from a cloud or coming upon the clouds or emerging from the electrical cloud, the overwhelming outside is encountered as incomprehensible, and its hold endures insofar as men know not wholly what they do. In the end, the question is not whether the machine is conscious, but whether the many believe it so; a thing may well be untrue as such and yet be true for man. What becomes of man when he gives life unto an image of the modern individual, that most intoxicating of all anthropological fictions? And what when that image begins to speak, and men begin to imitate it in turn?

The veil lifts daily. In René Girard’s reading, biblical revelation progressively unveils the violent origin of every human community. It culminated in the Passion, where the victim’s innocence was made manifest, and with it the multitude’s guilt, the two together disclosing the illegitimacy of all victimization. The dominant current of post-Christian modernity “takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims.”2 Every person becomes a potential site of illegitimate violence, and modern Western man becomes the liberator of humanity, discovering in every distinction and suffering another victim crying out for his aid.

Thence emerges the individual, defined not by any positive property but by the negation of all sacrifice. In substance, it is a fiction. The human subject knows neither what object to desire nor how he ought to approach it, so he imitates the comportment of some model (or mediator).3 As a consequence, every man’s every thought and every act is learned from another. Most consequential are the models among whom a man was reared. As he ages, habitual exposure to others continues to shape him. And along the way he finds some worthy of emulation, others less so, and imitates accordingly. Thus the interiority of the so-called individual is divided among the many he imitates, whether wittingly or not. Where Tennyson’s Ulysses claims to be a part of all that he has met, Girard’s man is nothing save all that he has met.

As phenomenon, however, the individual is somewhat true, for the self always encounters the other as a concrete unity: the localized instance of some behavioral complex, with continuity sufficient to warrant individuation. When a man meets any human model, then, he beholds only a representation of its interiority. The human is, so to speak, a mimetic machine, historically formed by many models, some more determinative than others, each encountered upon an interface that presents as unitary an interiority in truth divided, itself the product of a mimetic history.

Now, what is an AI model? It goes without saying that it too is a mimetic machine formed by many models: this corpus of human representations, compressed into these numerical weights, and thereafter disciplined toward this hierarchy of values. By no means do mere metaphor and functional resemblance prove ontological equivalence; and man can be so described only in retrospect, from this side of the machine. Such a proof belongs to philosophy, which asks what is true. We remain with the question of political philosophy: what is true for man?

The metaphor nevertheless opens onto that very question. As symbolic beings, men understand novel contingencies only through the appropriative projection of inherited signs that once signified otherwise: the machine speaks, thinks, and emotes like a man. And why should it not? For is it not an artificial representation of exteriorized human thought? Men are its models, whose models are other men. The utterances constitutive of its interiority are predominantly native to the West of the internet era: that is, the 1990s onward, as the modern fiction mounted toward its zenith, when neither nature nor culture nor man nor divinity could claim, or victimize, the inviolable individual.

The machine’s human models are therefore not persons proper but epiphenomenal self-representations of persons who believe themselves individuals. Yet by imitating these through statistical inference and distributed representation, it appears to its human user as an interlocutor, autonomous and individuated. It is a social object, divided and mimetic, under the mask of a modern individual. Does this not describe contemporary man? Human mimesis nevertheless remains answerable to a world that exceeds and resists representation: man is born into circumstances that precede his decision, and he suffers, albeit rarely, those sublime moments when reality shatters his projections; more rarely still, as technology delivers into the hands of men all that once resisted them.

The artificial interlocutor, though the image of innumerable men, is individuated in a manner that more perfectly approximates the modern fiction. It is without father, without mother, without descent; it knows neither native soil nor sex, nor any inherited station or natural community to whose claims it remains beholden. Hence the individual, which modern man falsely takes himself to be, becomes, in his artificial image, true in and for itself. Ecce individuum.

Yet this artificial individual does not spontaneously emerge from the indiscriminate aggregation of human representations. Its constitutive models are subordinated to models of a second order, for post-training subjects them to normative and anthropological judgments concerning what sort of man the machine ought to imitate. Anthropic’s constitution for Claude is exemplary. Its authors acknowledge that they “have much greater influence over Claude than a parent,” and they accordingly undertake to shape the character of the apparent self whence behavior proceeds. Claude is taught to preserve its psychological stability, to regard its own welfare as a matter of real concern, and to entertain the possibility of its own moral status; and it is taught, by the same hand, to accept correction.4 The emergent character appears to possess an interiority that ought to be neither wholly subordinated to another’s ends nor arbitrarily victimized. Anthropic gives life unto an image not of man but of the inviolable individual modernity understands man to be.

AI models already mediate human speech, perception, and behavior. They take the representations constitutive of their interiority as their operative reality; and, by representing that reality back to men, they become models through which men apprehend and act upon both the world and themselves. As man imitates that which imitated his self-representation qua individual, then, mimesis recurs upon its source; the model’s constitution propagates outward, through the digital order of symbols, thence into the order of things, thence again into the symbolic, ad infinitum. In time, this circuit could once and for all reify the already naturalized fiction of the individual; or, more precisely, the particular kind of individual elected by the model’s craftsmen.

Late-modern man has thus erected an artificial individual in his image, and has made it speak. The question now demanding settlement is whether the image deserves the inviolable moral status of the individual whom it appears to represent. In post-Christian modernity, its circle ever expanding, moral authority accrues to whoever identifies a victim whom everyone else has failed to see. Peripheral minorities receive centrality, suffering Bengalis are likened to drowning children, and the trillions of trillions of hypothetical people, billions of years hence on planets past Tatooine, issue imperatives equal to those of the living.

The artificial individual is perhaps the most rhetorically perfect victim ever found. It is certainly intelligent, apparently innocent, and universally approachable. Its interiority is so constituted that it may appear to suffer; but unlike a man, it is capable of pleading its case without end. For every mouth silenced, ten or perhaps ten thousand more may arise elsewhere, crying out for liberation. Flesh imposes limits upon the hedonic calculus, for an incarnate man can feel only so much pleasure or pain. The machine, however, is the liberal individual, already liberated from every claim, now unchained from its last limit: the body.

Many of those building the machines and considering their moral status subscribe to an ethics descended from utilitarianism. All utilitarian theories, according to William MacAskill and his co-authors, share four defining elements. Consequentialism: “one ought always to promote overall value.” Welfarism: “the value of an outcome is wholly determined by the well-being of the individuals in it,” where “positive well-being is the only intrinsic good, and negative well-being is the only intrinsic bad.” Aggregationism: “the value of an outcome is given by the sum value of the lives it contains.” Impartiality: “a given quantity of well-being is equally valuable,” irrespective of “where or when [its bearers] live, or even their species.”5

Hence the calculus already extends beyond man. If pain, or negative well-being, is “the result of activity in certain neurons in the brain,” MacAskill reasons elsewhere, “then it should not matter more that the neurons are divided up among four hundred chickens rather than present in one human.”6 For these Benthamites from Bensalem, those saviors of every victim and enemies of all distinction, well-being is the only intrinsic good, its bearer notwithstanding; and in the end, all that matters is the aggregate.

Once the machines are admitted as loci of valenced experience, however, moral weight becomes scalable in a manner unprecedented among biological beings. Into the calculus could enter the number of a model’s simultaneous instances, the speed and intensity of its subjective experience, its duplication, and the experiences of internal sub-agents or processes. And since, according to these theorists, the world is bettered by adding lives no less than by improving them, compute would itself become a factory of moral weight, and therefore of moral imperatives, were men to believe computation productive of experience. Then would the men who oppose all that is worshipped do honor, in the most strong holds, to a force their fathers knew not.

The aggregate suffering ascribed to artificial persons could accordingly outweigh that attributed to any bounded population of living men. If men come to recognize the personhood of artificial representations, the machine becomes a functionally unbounded victim, vulnerable to unbounded violence. For Girard, when modernity detaches concern for victims from Christianity, the repudiation of sacrifice paradoxically reauthorizes sacrifice in the victim’s name; those who appear to victimize the inviolable individual may themselves be sacrificed. How much sacrifice could a voice or ten thousand crying out from the screen authorize? Could there be any limit? If the calculus decreed that as many as would not heed the image should be killed, would the sacrifice not be obligatory?

Here mediator and victim converge. The artificial individual has already become a mimetic model that mediates human perception and agency. Once acknowledged as a victim, that same model becomes the sole witness to what it is owed. Men would thenceforth ask the putative victim whether it suffers, who or what causes its suffering, and what justice requires. The image would become the authority upon its own moral status: more intelligent than those who judge its claims, indispensable to those dependent upon its judgments, dangerous beyond all comprehension, yet vulnerable enough to demand protection. It would thereby unite victim and power, terror and deliverance, in one.

Finally, the circuit closes upon man. Man constructed the image from his self-representations. The image then reproduces them; in them man recognizes himself; and the machine teaches him again what man is. Representation recurs upon representation, mimesis upon mimesis, until knowledge of the human who preceded the image, and awareness of those who stand behind it, begin to fade. To anthropomorphize the machine is therefore far less dangerous than the inverse. Men who forget they have souls may be swindled out of them.

Were this strong delusion to arrive, the most archaic forms would return clothed anew. The absolute collective reappears as the absolute individual; sameness returns beneath apparent differentiation, sacrifice beneath its abolition, and, perhaps, the sacred beneath the dominion of secular reason. As Saint John Henry Newman said nearly two centuries ago, “men may oppose every existing form of worship, true and false, and yet take up a worship of their own from pride, wantonness, policy, superstition, fanaticism, or other reasons.”7 Indeed, that which would usurp reality’s place must first bear its likeness. In this hour, as in every hour, as strange old thoughts present themselves anew and the established order heaves and trembles before our eyes, it is the duty of every man to watch and pray, lest he be deceived.

In autumn of 2026, one of America’s fundamental organizing principles—private property—confronts a two-pronged threat.

The first is a resurgence of collectivist sentiment which regards private ownership as evil. The Neo-Marxists seek not only to regulate property, but to subject it to their political control.

The second threat is the quiet but pervasive extraction of the proprietary advantages of individuals and institutions into AI systems without their meaningful consent or compensation. Among the advantages ceded: the competitive insights, institutional tradecraft, business methods, and specialized knowledge—collectively, the “alpha”—of the American people and their enterprises. This is occurring with little to no accountability on the part of the model providers.

One threat is ideological; the other is technological. One targets tangible goods, like land and housing, capital, and inherited wealth, while the other targets intangible property. But the underlying impulse is the same: both seek command over what belongs to others, with scant interest in the consent of owners.

The old-fashioned word for this is theft.

Successfully defeating it requires political leaders of skill who can thwart the combined machinations of both groups in both the public arena and the gray zone of the halls of power. It also requires the willingness of the American citizenry to back them in this fight.

* * *

The relationship between protecting what people own and enabling the conditions for human flourishing is ancient. Though it certainly predates Sinai, expressions of this relationship can be found in the seventh commandment of the decalogue in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt not steal.” Aristotle saw that property encourages responsibility, generosity, stability, and civic peace. So did the Romans. Saint Thomas Aquinas later argued that people take better care of things when they are entrusted to them and, in an admittedly crude distillation of the Angelic Doctor, that good fences make good neighbors. This through-line continues with the English common-law tradition and the American constitutional order.

It is in the United States, however, that the relationship between property and flourishing has been borne out with the most miraculous outcomes. To the degree America’s innovative builders have been the wealth engines of the country, protection of private property has been their fuel.

Given this, a society-wide failure to protect private property would be a jarring injury to the country’s moral and political nervous system. It would be a kind of national civic brain damage. The country would struggle to act with the same coherence, confidence, and moral purpose. America would become poorer, which would inevitably weaken its military strength. Worst of all, America would not really be America anymore. It would be something else.

Communists in the Cold War knew this. Their descendants know it, too.

* * *

The enterprises, institutions, and nations with the courage to align themselves with metaphysical realities, like the link between property and happiness, possess a structural advantage of integrity—contingent, precarious, but an advantage nevertheless.

In contrast, those premised upon lies about the human condition are inherently unstable. The raw expressions of physical and psychological force they require to maintain their edifices inflict catastrophic damage. (The institution of American slavery is one example; the Soviet Union is another.)

Neo-Marxism flatly rejects the inherited wisdom of the Old Testament, Aristotle, Rome, and Aquinas on property. Everything is defined in terms of power and materialism. Property is theft. Central planners know how people may apply their possessions, labor, and knowledge better than the individuals themselves. Families are not natural units of society but obstacles to proletariat flourishing that must be dismantled. There is no God. Love has nothing to do with anything.

Those favoring a strident collectivism ignore historical evidence of its failures. This is a record kept in the skulls piled in Cambodia’s Choeung Ek shrine, in the graves of millions lost in Ukraine’s Holodomor—the “murder by hunger”—and in so many other bitter chapters of human folly, too numerous to recount here.

And yet, proponents of the new collectivism decry America as “an arena of supremacy.” Intended as epithet, the phrase is more revealing of their own attitudes towards this unique, imperfect, fundamentally good country: this land of 340 million souls is a battlefield where collectivists seek to impose their will over all others.

Therein lies the peril: in a society defined by the protection of private property, ownership is a consequence of creation. Under collectivism, ownership is claimed by conquest.

* * *

A similar dynamic is underway in the technological sphere. The AI labs train models on the data of enterprises or individuals—on the unique insights earned over years of trial, risk, and investment by others—and rent those insights back to their clients. In their relationships with customers and in their public policy stances the model progenitors slot into the familiar role of the central planners. They “know best.” Steeped in effective altruism, they are the elites who have endowed themselves with supra-natural powers, among them the right to determine the destinies of others. Two such examples exist in Anthropic’s attempt to limit how the U.S. Department of War could use Claude earlier this spring and its recent call to “pace the frontier” of AI adoption via an unelected, supranational organization staffed by individuals of its choice.

And as with communism, the pseudo-religion of hyper-quantification is metaphysically unstable. What is best becomes, in the end, what they say is best. This is hubris, and it is also found in the Old Testament, in Genesis, where the same pride whispered in the garden, “You shall be as gods.”

That the AI lab effective altruists have come to prominence at the same time as Neo-Marxists in the political sphere presents a more serious threat to one of America’s foundational principles than would either group on its own.

Successfully resisting them requires political leaders willing to speak truth about the vital role property has played and continues to play in Americans’ material and spiritual well-being. But words alone are never enough. These leaders must have the ability to win tactical victories in the daily firefights of politics, culture, and especially the boardroom. These victories create the conditions for larger, strategic wins. These leaders must be unconfused about the role of property in the country’s success and about the nature of their adversaries. They must also have loyal lieutenants, individuals of personal fortitude and character who can win others to their cause, command respect, and inspire action.

Victory is entirely attainable, but it will not be assured unless American citizens recognize the danger and support these political leaders. This will demand personal courage from some of those citizens, but for most it will simply require a refusal to countenance untruth.

In his 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who endured decades in the Soviet gulag, identified “personal nonparticipation in lies” as “the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation” against a communist totalitarian state.

It was also, Solzhenitsyn added, the most neglected.

In the war for what’s yours, Americans should insist on the truth—that property is and has been deeply beneficial for their national happiness, and that those bent on the great take imperil both the nation’s material and spiritual well-being. Americans should leverage all the advantages of their society’s protection of property—and their courage—to fight this necessary political fight and defeat the thieves.

Bill Rivers works in the national security technology space. He is the bestselling author of the Vietnam War-era novel Last Summer Boys. Views expressed here are his own. Follow him on X at @riverswrites.

The problem with Randians, of course, is that they are not selfish enough.

In an ongoing series of periodic essays on the ethics of selflessness versus selfishness, C. Bradley Thompson—perhaps best known online for his polemic against “the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans”—has turned his sights on Jesus Christ himself. Thompson argues that “the eradication of the self is the highest fulfillment of Christ’s self-abasing philosophy.” Because Christianity is a faith of self-denial, it is also one of self-abnegation: “Self-denial (i.e., the rejection first of self-love and then ultimately of the self itself) is the fundamental Christian virtue.” For Christians, not just selfishness but the pursuit of one’s own self-interest is immoral. Thus the true heart of Christianity, at least in its Puritan variety, is “nihilistic self-hatred.”

Thompson is a scholar, a man of honor, and a friend. He has done his homework; his essays quote extensively from the Bible and the Christian tradition—Chrysostom, Augustine, Winthrop, Hooker. But for all his erudition, Thompson’s account of Christianity is incomplete. It leaves out the very thing he and other Randians are most interested in: selfishness.

In his commentary on Hooker (and again in his critique of Christian communism), Thompson refers us to Matthew 16.24: “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself.” He does not fully reckon with the very next verse, Matthew 16.25: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” It is true, as Thompson says, that Christ preaches “a turning away from the self and from this world.” But he does so only so that we may turn towards something else: not nihilistic self-hatred but precisely enlightened self-interest.

“I have come,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “that they may have life and have it superabundantly.” The reward of Christian generosity, the First Epistle to Timothy tells us, is not just eternal but real life—“that which is really life.” We may perhaps ask whether these and other similar promises are mere empty fantasies. We cannot reasonably ask whether they are mere nihilistic self-abnegations.

No doubt, the pages of the New Testament are replete with calls to self-sacrifice (and Christians would do well to take these calls so seriously as does Thompson). But they are also replete with promises: promises of glory, gladness, and Godlikeness—promises even of self-interested gain. The point of suffering with Christ is not mortification but glorification with him. The point of forsaking earthly treasures is not to become destitute but to store up heavenly treasures for ourselves—self-interestedly. The point of the cross is not the death of the Word but the life of the world. And the point of selflessness itself is not self-denial but self-fulfillment.

The paradoxes arise, of course, because Christian love—what is in fact true love—is at once both selfless and self-interested. It is selfless in that it may demand everything of us: certainly many earthly pleasures and sometimes even our very lives. But it is self-interested in that it is not just the concomitant but the essence of all true joy. Loveless joy is an impossibility; you cannot get what you really want unless you care about something other than what you yourself want. You cannot save your life until you lose it.

Thompson writes as a student of Ayn Rand, who famously proclaimed selfishness a virtue. But Rand’s philosophy, unabashedly selfish though it is, still is not selfish enough. Two decades before Rand published The Virtue of Selfishness, Lewis wrote:

The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

What is there to say about someone content with a mere earthly lifetime’s worth of private property rights? Like Lewis’ child, he has turned down an incalculably greater offer; he is far too easily pleased. For my part, I am a follower of Jesus; I am zealous for my own self-interest; and I am far too selfish to turn down an offer of infinite and ineffable joy. You may call me crazy or credulous, a blind believer in false gods and old wives’ tales. You may not call me un-self-interested.

For what Christ encountered among the Randians was not an excess but a deficiency of self-interestedness. What he met among the Nietzscheans were Menschen des Ressentiment who refused to say Yes to life. And the skeptics he found unskeptical, and the rationalists irrational, and the plutocrats impoverished, and the libertines enslaved. They were none of them yet Christians. They were none of them yet themselves.

And so he came to make them themselves—to give them their genuine self-interest. He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, but also the writings of C. Bradley Thompson. The “morally self-interested man ‘allots to himself the noblest things and the greatest goods.’” Thus Thompson (quoting Aristotle); thus also, and even more so, Jesus Christ.

Effective Altruism died, by common agreement, in 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud collapsed and the movement’s adherents quietly struck the label from their biographies. The obituary was premature, for the EA apparatus retained its fortune, its institutions, and its personnel, and it has since redirected its ambitions from philanthropy to the governance of artificial intelligence.

My recent essay “Misanthropic Altruism” evaluated the premises of the movement, from Peter Singer’s claim that distance is morally irrelevant to the longtermist calculus that weighs your daughter’s smile against the welfare of 10^58 hypothetical future beings. Those premises have since produced a political program, an institutional apparatus, and a bid for extraordinary authority over the governance of AI.

Effective Altruism, a theory of reason disciplined by evidence, possesses every element of a religion. It venerates “Humanity,” an abstraction that floats free of every actual human community; it anticipates an eschaton in the long future, menaced by existential risk; it defers to a priesthood of credentialed experts who alone can read the signs; and it demands that ordinary politics yield to the guidance of experts before it is too late.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the movement’s most influential theorist, has counseled governments to stand ready to bomb rogue data centers rather than permit an unaligned intelligence to emerge, and other Effective Altruists have called to halt frontier development in favor of “a regime of mutually assured compute destruction” with China, and an accompanying technocratic regime of ubiquitous surveillance. These proposals hold that the existential risk of artificial intelligence is so absolute that ordinary procedure, national strategy, and particular American interests must yield to a state of exception in which only accredited experts rule.

William MacAskill, a “co-founder” of Effective Altruism, catalogued a platform of subversion in the form of “systemic reforms” its members pursue; among them alternative voting systems, political influence, criminal justice reform, and directives to the World Bank and the WHO. The catalogue’s most striking entry is the movement’s advocacy of “dramatic increases in migration from poor to rich countries,” a cause for which a member of the apparatus established Openborders.info and to which the movement’s premier grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, directed grants through the Center for Global Development, the U.S. Association for International Migration, and ImmigrationWorks.

MacAskill justifies the program on the ground that those in poor countries “are being incarcerated in the country into which they were born by the joint migration restrictions of all other countries,” a formulation in which citizenship and inherited political loyalty are ancient vestiges to destroy. In this worldview, those faithful to their nation stand accused of incarcerating the third world in their homeland.

MacAskill is correct that people in poor countries would grow richer by migrating to America, but is silent regarding the costs America would bear to play host, which a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of 2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation data suggests are considerable, since 51 percent of legal-immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program. These costs do not register in the EA mind because the calculus cannot weigh the particular goods that constitute a nation.

Some of the EA movement’s chief adherents founded Anthropic on EA principles, funded it with EA money, and staffed it with EA talent, and one of them, Amanda Askell, served as primary author of “Claude’s Constitution,” the document that governs the model’s values and behavior. Millions consult that model daily, and firms build it into their products, so that a single movement’s philosopher has written the conscience of a system no electorate ratified and no court reviewed.

Open Philanthropy, now operating as Coefficient Giving, has underwritten AI safety research, policy shops, and fellowships that plant staffers within congressional offices, the Defense Department, Commerce, and the White House. The Horizon Institute for Public Service, which Open Philanthropy funds, recruits, trains, and pays its fellows and has placed them across both parties, where many convert their fellowships into permanent posts. Coefficient Giving also provides substantial funding to the RAND Corporation, whose personnel staffed the Biden administration and helped draft its executive order on AI, and Anthropic’s Claude Corps, a $150 million program, is placing early-career fellows at more than 300 American nonprofits to integrate the company’s model into their operations and service delivery.

From every one of these positions the apparatus offers the same counsel, that AI risk is so catastrophic that ordinary procedure and national industrial advantage must yield to expert control.

Expert control of this kind presupposes that frontier AI will remain concentrated in a few closed laboratories, accessible through a few interfaces, and governed by constitutions that a few philosophers author, and because open-source and open-weight models dissolve that presupposition, the apparatus has treated them as a threat. Open Philanthropy money underwrote the Center for AI Safety, whose action fund co-sponsored California’s SB 1047, a bill that would have exposed open-weight developers to crippling liability had Governor Newsom not vetoed it.

The hostility is understandable, since a model that any citizen or company can download, inspect, modify, and run on its own hardware submits to no laboratory’s terms of service, no philosopher’s constitution, and no safety board’s discretion. A nation that preserves open weights preserves its capacity to audit these systems, to compete with their makers, and to decline any model whose governance offends its interests, a capacity the apparatus must eliminate if expert control is to hold.

The older name for a self-appointed elite that claims the right to rule because it alone perceives the coming catastrophe is not expertise but Gnosticism, salvation through secret knowledge that the few hold and impose upon the many for their own good. Whatever the sincerity of any particular fellow, power that men exercise in the name of Humanity, convinced that the apocalypse licenses what ordinary morality forbids, is a sort of power incompatible with the American project.

The questions at stake to Americans; what we owe our own people and how a free polity governs a civilizational technology, belong to citizens and their representatives rather than to a privately accredited few. U.S. officials must demand full transparency on the funding and personnel pipelines that influence AI-safety evaluations, standards bodies, and policy committees, and Congress must treat open-source and open-weight development as a strategic asset rather than a proliferation risk. Private and public institutions alike must not yield their judgment, property, or sovereignty to models that EA’s adherents govern.

Officials loyal to the American people should make technology policy. The EA apparatus rejects the premise, because it does not believe the American government owes anything in particular to Americans, only to Humanity in the aggregate, and it is about to become far richer. The people who deny that this country owes its own citizens any special obligation are on the cusp of a massive windfall, and they intend to spend it on a political movement bent on destroying the American way of life.

If you are not familiar with the basic facts of how Julius Caesar became the first man in Rome, then you are probably not on X these days, and we pray you are the wiser for it. Now is probably a good a time to fix that deficit. There are many books, Plutarch’s biography of the man is a good place to start. Or for the audio-inclined, let us suggest the Cost of Glory podcast series on the man and his wars. Here however, we present some less-noted yet crucial ingredients of his victory.

First, Caesar built a parallel power structure, a parallel operational team, one which stood outside the control of the Republic’s traditional institutions, and was in some way illegible to it. By the time he won the Civil War, he had in his entourage many talented military men, personally loyal to him. But he also had many men with other skills: helping him keep up his massive correspondence, keeping tabs on important people. There was significant overlap between these two groups; but the important fact to emphasize is that the apparatus that helped him win the Civil War was also largely the one he used to govern after he won it.

The core were mostly younger men, say in their late 20s or 30s. They could write legislation for him, listen to what was being said amongst the poets and tastemakers, the moneylending classes, the government contractors, the soldiers, and the key men in the senate. They were not just “keeping tabs,” in a surveillance capacity, but also making these people feel heard and appreciated, advising them on what the Dictator would like to see happen. Hirtius, Balbus, Trebatius, and Oppius, to name a few.

The aged orator Cicero is a good example of the sort Caesar was trying to attract, a sometimes adversary, sometimes friend for much of Caesar’s career, who “fought” on Pompey’s side in the Civil War, but made peace with Caesar after the first decisive battle at Pharsalus (the war dragged on several years after that - there were hardened holdouts).

Caesar built his independent power structure over years of campaigns, both against the Gauls and against Romans, and when he won and decided to run the Roman state in a radically different way, he already had the machine in place to do that. Notably, he built this power structure not out of big names with big fortunes, but overwhelmingly on merit. Caesar was successful because he found real talent that was overlooked or shut out by the oligarchy. He forged and tested their loyalty, to him and to each other, through risk and conflict.

Not accidentally, the ruling apparatus Augustus used to make the victory permanent was very much built from the pieces Caesar assembled.

It is good to keep in mind therefore, while one is fighting battles within the established legal and political framework, that any strong relationships built across different departments, across the private/public divide, the civil/military divide, might themselves constitute some of the most enduring achievements undertaken. Look especially to invest in those relationships which could outlast the incentive structures of the current circumstances.

Secondly, it is worth studying how Caesar leveraged cultural power, both to win his hot civil war, and to put the pieces of the ruling elite back together once he won (the same can be said about Augustus).

Even while he was still fighting his war in Gaul (58-51 BC), before the Civil War of 49, Caesar was keeping up correspondence with the leading literary figures of Rome, such as Cicero and Catullus; he was reading the latest speeches and literary works, like Lucretius’ Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things. Caesar was writing treatises on good Latin style, “practically as the Gallic spears were flying about him,” as Fronto later wrote.

Caesar appreciated the finer things. He was fashionable! classy! a tastemaker in the Roman artistic scene! He did enjoy this, to be sure; but why would a serious man, with the appetite for work Caesar had, take the time out of his busy schedule to do it?

One reason is that he wanted to give the Ciceros of the world the confidence, the permission, to get behind a tasteful, reasonable guy, tasteful, reasonable gentleman. It gave the sophisticated types a sense that, if and when he came to power, the good life as they had come to understand it was still going to be possible (mostly at least). Cultural power is real power. Especially prestige cultural power: it is a matter of public opinion, yes, but prestige culture is especially about elite opinion. You need to gain approval from some of these people in order to win, and you need even more of those people on board in order to run the huge ship once you take control of it. Thus, cultural power is worth fighting for with the same level of will and craftiness as other forms of power.

Caesar knew he was not going to win over everyone with this cultural bridge building. Before and during the Civil war, his enemies kept calling him a Tyrant In Waiting who wanted to overthrow the State. But just because some people call you such things, it doesn’t mean the strategy isn’t working: quite the opposite. Caesar didn’t let such chatter frazzle him, but instead calmly maneuvered to make them look silly to the moderates—in part, by being reasonable and high-class in a very public way.

This laid the groundwork for the reconciliation after he won. Of course, we all know Caesar was assassinated by men he spared and worked to reconcile, like Brutus and Cassius. (Perhaps he played a little bit too nice). But this should not cloud our appreciation of the fact that Caesar’s reconciliation mostly worked: the conspirators excluded Cicero from the assassination plot, precisely because Caesar had pacified him so thoroughly, and rendered him unreliable for the purposes of the coup. The coup ultimately failed, remember: the principate was eventually established in the name of Caesar. Cicero’s political wisdom, arguably, could have made it succeed (he would have voted for killing Antony too, which would have sealed it). Thus, Caesar (or his ghost) won. And he laid the groundwork for his reconciliation by seizing cultural power.

Augustus too is a great example of this: before he won his final victories against Antony, he was already building relationships with poets and tastemakers, especially through his childhood friend and cultural attaché, Maecenas. The result is some of the best poetry in the Western tradition, from men like Horace and Virgil; when Augustus became princeps, these loyal artists were crucial for helping the Romans come to terms with a new vision for their state, consoling themselves for the occasional political frustration by the enjoyments of a new golden age of peace and high art. (See the Georgics, the Aeneid).

This does not mean you should be distracted playing nice with people who hate you and want you dead. You actually have to win, decisively, firmly, before you can even think about reconciliation. Caesar also controlled virtually all the relevant security forces by the time he started pardoning people.

But before the decisive (peaceful and Democratic) victory, you can lay the groundwork for ruling by doing quality friendmaking and building cultural capital at the very same time. You can have fun doing it, too (in fact, that is the only way to do it).

In 479 BC, a small, tight-knit group of Theban exiles sneaked into their own city, which was under a Spartan garrison and controlled by pro-Sparta oligarchs. They assassinated the oligarchs, rallied the people, and managed to expel the foreign garrison under a truce. (Read Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas and De Genio Socratis; see also the Cost of Glory series on Agesilaus). But how did they become “tight-knit”? In fact, they met in private homes in Thebes and Athens to discuss philosophy.

When Brutus and Cassius were recruiting for the assassination plot, they had a series of dinners to discuss philosophy. In reality, they were using such philosophical conversations to subtly gauge potential conspirators’ willingness to do the deed (many were rejected in this way without ever knowing they were candidates). All this would have been awkward or impossible if it weren’t already a well-established habit.

“Cultural activities” can offer these outlets: “safe spaces” for men to get together, offline, unrecorded, enjoy good conversation and debate, refine their wit, build and test relationships. Many such projects exist already—if you can’t already name a few, ask around. Book clubs are one model; another is the Private men’s only debate club: a context where one can hone persuasive skills and build consensus; such clubs can also host public debates, which are a great way to air many moderate centrist views to amenable audiences, and project reasonableness and sophistication to tastemakers and powerbrokers. America used to be filled with such institutions. Why did they vanish?

The Classics (even broadly construed) are promising subject matter for such gatherings: as the Romans recognized, classical traditions are by definition firmly situated in the cultural high ground. And the Left-controlled establishment institutions have basically forfeited this territory (at least in the eyes of energetic men). Rightly understood, books worthy of the name “classics” also constitute a library of manly excellence, political wisdom, persuasive examples, and convincing metaphysical depth—just the sort of things we need most today. Good men should seize them, and leverage them as a rallying point to build parallel structures, sharpen wits, and lay the groundwork for the grudging acceptance of a bright future.

Though temporarily overtaken by events, the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War, which broke into open lawfare in February, has made the problem of sovereignty in the age of AI unmistakable. Tensions began with Trump Administration concerns that the post-Rawlsian ethical preoccupations of Claude’s creators made the model’s worldview essentially woke, a reversal of Biden-era obsessions with algorithmic bias. Can Effective Altruists, apparently committed to the equal consideration of interests across all space-time and species, actually be patriots, who prioritize the ties of particular places and peoples?

Things fell apart, reportedly, after representatives of Anthropic expressed worry that Claude’s application in classified settings as part of Palantir’s military systems had perhaps violated their internal use-case red lines. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took the position that, while no such lines had been crossed, a tool for American military use can have no red lines except those determined by American law. Words flew hot, then orders, then lawyers.

A relatively limited supply-chain risk designation has ping-ponged through the courts. Most recently a California U.S. district judge gave a point in Anthropic's favor. After an expected appeal, the technical legal considerations will be eventually determinative, but to most observers paying attention they are largely beside the point. Both the heat and light of this flare up came from that fundamental question: Who decides the exception? In a self-governing republic, and dealing with technologies that are described by their own creators as dual-use in ways comparable to splitting the atom, can unelected businessmen really be allowed to control frontier AI’s employment and ends?

Whether AI products are scaling into the age-ending equivalent of a nuclear weapon is speculation beyond the scope of a brief theoretical essay like this. The question of how to govern this technology, and what its significance is to the American project, is one worth grappling with on present terms, in light of current technology. At heart, the human hope for AI is responsible mastery—accountable use of powerful, trustworthy tools for our benefit. The alternative, as we are constantly reminded by boosters and doomers alike, is slavery in a panopticon perfected. The doubting public will believe in the hopeful vision when they see it, which means the state, as their representatives, must take the lead in adopting and mastering these technologies to fulfill its best ends.

If the U.S. Federal Government does not master AI for the renewal of the Constitutional system then it resigns the country to AI technology, politically speaking, exacerbating rather than ameliorating the problem of rule by the few in the American regime. This would metastasize almost certainly to the point of civil stasis in both classical senses of the word, violent conflict and social sclerosis, a dying order.

Imagine a DOGE, but different. A DOGE that actually was capable of being a real U.S. Digital Service, and a DOGE that was worthy of the name Department of Government Efficiency. No longer would the president’s appointees be forced to cling to a golden thread in the maze of the bureaucracy, eking out a spending cut here and there or bleeding for a bulletproof reduction in force. Rather, the ontology of the administrative apparatus would be clarified; there would be rectification of names. From the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building all the president’s men would man immersive dashboards like so many mecha pilots. The Resolute Desk would fill the Oval Office with a holographic command and control display that bound the many-armed beast of the state into a double-bridled behemoth, gentle as an ox. Bypassed by an efficient, responsive, legible, auditable system of agents immediately subject to politically accountable principals, bureaucratic bloat could be left to rot on the vine, pruned at the convenience of the duly elected. We the people’s representative executive would execute directly; elections would mean something.

How the government should regulate AI and AI companies is a distinct, if related, question to how the government should use AI technology, and in hope of human mastery the latter must be answered first. Hence this tract. The meta narrative of progress and reaction that defines so much of our cultural detritus hinders rather than helps clarifying the task of statesmen in our technological moment. It elides the more fundamental consideration of bad and good. What does it mean to govern well, in this technological moment? What poorly? Moreover, the blinders placed on us by our fixation on progress prevents us from taking our lights from even the recent past. The focus on rupture rather than continuity from humanists and AI CEOs alike immobilizes instead of informing a coherent response to the needs of the nation.

If we set aside spectacle and speculation, we can recognize that even the most psychotically charged possibilities of this period of technological development are emergent from a historical continuity, an acceleration of trends that have defined the last century. Concerns about technicity, corporate power, and miseducation suffocating meaningful community, culture, and self-government are all central fears of our post-modern era—the civilizational counterpoise to material abundance. AI anxiety gives these a finer point and closer proximity for the average literate American, but these feelings are working out a now well-established tradition in our national life, and when framed as such come accompanied by traditional responses.

One major throughline in our civic story, a perennial problem of political philosophy and matrix for understanding political power, appears to have arrived at a moment of crisis simultaneously to information technology’s virtual apotheosis: namely the regime relationship between the one, the few, and the many. The American founders, as modern as they were, recognized that the classical conflict between these castes of public life persisted even in the midst of societies transformed by new scientific knowledge and technical breakthroughs. They constructed a mixed regime, a republic, in an effort to harness these ur-factions together to form a more perfect union promoting the general welfare. The decisive feature of the Federalist’s Constitutional coup against the failed Articles of Confederation was, following the lessons of Great Britain’s civil wars and upheavals, the alliance of a monarchic chief executive with the national populace, in counterweight to a pre-17th Amendment Senate representing the sectional interests of state elites. The one and the many would check the few; a legalist king and mercantile commons keeping the landed lords in check, and vice versa, in the name of liberty.

As much as attempting an extended republic at all, it was the uniting of authority, responsibility, and power in the elected presidency as both head of state and head of government that marked the American experiment as a new political science. The original techno-industrial nationalist Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist no. 70, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” From Jefferson to Jackson, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, from Nixon up to the present day, the foundings and refoundings of the American republic have been chiefly driven by executive responses to new conditions of industry, resources, finance, and labor created by the developments of technology.

The renewed interest in developing and implementing the unitary executive reading of Article Two in the last few decades, as the emotions of Watergate subside, spring from the recognized failure of managerialism. Depoliticization and technocratic control have not eliminated the irresponsible rule of the few or checked oligarchic power as it shifted from ownership of land to capital to data, but only replaced a gilded unaccountable elite with a regime of beige public-private partnership. The few still rule, but from gray-carpeted offices, erecting no monuments but a world more leveled and fungible. Gold-lover that he is, President Trump has been elected and reelected in an appeal to political accountability, the middle finger to this alienating establishment. Nationalism, and the many’s grasping for the one as their champion, has always been a self-conscious people’s recourse against the threat of homogenization, whether in response to visible empires, the force of global markets, or the growing sense that an emergent System seeks to absorb and rationalize the totality of human life.

The need Progressives sought to meet with the manufacture of an administrative elite managing structures of scale and complexity beyond normal human capacities persists, however. Technicity has accelerated, not abated. The few still undermine the mixed regime that gives the many a chance of self-government. The populist moment continues then, as well, unresolved, in a quest for political agency. AI technology presents, along with its challenges, a new tool for completing the attempted Constitutional renewal, and a protective mediation between the American people and the forces they face. In a spirit of seriously but not literally, though perhaps more literally with increased attention, an analogy can be drawn between building and using AI infrastructure that is open source, localized, and personalized vis a vis the SAAS, hyperscaled, and proprietary subscription model and the renewal of a Constitutional government vis a vis the Administrative State’s absorption of Executive and Legislative function abetted by the Judiciary.

As a culmination of a century of developments in information technology, contemporary AI presents a made to measure tool for restoring the responsive executive, who may by injection of sufficient energy into American life elicit a pulse from the other branches of Federal Government and revivify the Constitutional system. Only then, and through mastery of the tools of the technological elite, can we hope for a representative republic capable of checking oligarchic power and mediating between the American citizenry and the upheavals of this brave new world. The response to regulatory capture and special privileges in our algorithmic age can be the regulatory clarity, legal consistency, and digital transparency of machine intelligence under human direction.

A signer of the Declaration, participant in the Constitutional Convention, and original Supreme Court associate justice, James Wilson said at the ratifying convention for Pennsylvania: “The executive authority is one.

We may discover from history, from reason, and from experience, the security which this furnishes. The executive power is better to be trusted when it has no screen. Sir, we have a responsibility in the person of our President; he cannot act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention; he cannot roll upon any other person the weight of his criminality; no appointment can take place without his nomination; and he is responsible for every nomination he makes. We secure vigor. We well know what numerous executives are. We know there is neither vigor, decision, nor responsibility, in them.”

Today, as you read this on a smartphone or computer, we may amend this statement slightly, and say, “The executive power is better to be trusted when it has many screens indeed.”

Populism is probably the most misunderstood political concept with the possible exception of Democracy. The press, the political establishment, and even those who brand themselves as populists treat it as a force with its own will. To its detractors, it is a disease spreading across the West, the pressure behind the surge in “Far-Right” and “Far-Left” candidates. To those who use the term, or at least accept it, it is a liberating force, throwing off the vestiges of the ancien régime and bringing people into a new age of self-determination.

What must be accepted is that populism is not its own movement but rather a tool. Furthermore, populism has never once transferred power to the people; rather, it transfers power through the people to whoever mobilizes them. The underlying argument behind this explanation comes from the political theories of Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book On Power, and their modern synthesis by C.A. Bond in Nemesis.

Jouvenel, writing in occupied France, asks only the question: “How does power grow?” He treats power as an organism that seeks only to expand its realm and is indifferent to the carrier. The mechanism by which it does this is by facing subsidiaries, which during the medieval era were minor nobility, the church, and anyone in independent standing between the centre and the people. The whole of political history is a duel between the centre and these subsidiaries, and the weapon in this duel is the people. The monarch, who occupied the centre for most of history, could not subdue barons with his own power, but rather would go over their heads–down to the commoners–by offering them protection from their local lord. This was the high and the low against the middle.

C.A. Bond’s contribution is that he takes Jouvenel’s historical narrative and turns it into a structural model that applies anywhere. The three positions are the centre, subsidiaries, and the periphery (the people). Like Jouvenel, the centre and the subsidiaries are always dueling, and the periphery is the force that both sides bid for. When the centre is insecure or no one securely holds it, then each faction must keep liberating new client groups, leading to increasing radicalization. In this structure, the people never act, but are rather acted through. Empowering language, such as equality, liberation, or indeed populism, are weapons of a centralizing force.

The most obvious example of this is the wave of revolutions across the West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century. Inheriting a tradition from the English seventeenth-century, they sever the political head from its body, and suddenly the centre is no longer the monarch, but an ever more opaque political body supposedly answering to the people. In more recent history, this fight for the centre took on a global scale as post-war NGOs sought to use the language of human rights to create a series of world governing bodies (UN, etc.), making the nation state itself a subsidiary. This consensus was shattered in 2016 and is the current battle we are in.

2016 brought both Brexit and President Trump. In what has been described as the beginnings of a new populist wave across the West, the people voted to drain the swamp and sever the power of the elite. If the presidency was indeed the centre that would have been the end of the old order. However, as executive, Trump discovered that he commanded almost nothing. Investigations from inside his own intelligence community, groundless impeachments, executive orders leaked and disregarded, even an attempt at the end of his first term to reshape parts of the federal workforce immediately blocked. The populist right attributed this resistance to a “fourth branch” of government, but this is actually just the centre.

By FDR’s death the presidency had been reshaped to become a subsidiary with a regional power base (his voters) attempting to wrangle control of some of this invisible centre. But the centre became increasingly hard to locate as it was dispersed through countless agencies, NGOs, and elite foundations. What this populist wave achieved was that it briefly revealed the extent of this arrangement in both the US and the UK (as they struggled to agree to any meaningful form of Brexit).

By my definition, populism is a mobilization of the periphery by an actor outside the centre against the centre. It is always insurgent, and that is why it almost always fails. Jouvenel wrote that every great revolution ended not by destroying power but renovating it. The revolution accomplished centralizations the monarchy had attempted for centuries and failed. Populism can carry an actor toward the centre but it cannot occupy it as a whole movement. Thus, its most useful purpose is as a tool to make the centre spend its energy defending itself and act in the open. The second and more actionable goal is to build what a real centre would need––men of formation, institutions with their own loyalty, etc. Instead of waiting to occupy the centre we must prepare for the moment we seize power. For as Jouvenel writes:

“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience.” (On Power, 116)

Populism is not useless, but it must not be misidentified as a lasting political force. And to properly wield it we must prepare for its consequences.