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.