Harris’s 107 Days and the Missing Reckoning: Gaza

Early coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days, has been unfair. Yet Harris still won't adequately deal with the Biden administration's complicity in the Gaza genocide, or her own role.

Much of the early media coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign-trail memoir, 107 Days, was essentially unfair. Political commentators and media outlets portrayed her book as divisive, splitting the Democratic camp at a time when unity against Trump 2.0 was the top priority. USA Today reported that 107 Days was filled with “score-settling.” Politico claimed Harris’s book constituted an “ambush of fellow Democrats” because—shockingly!—Harris “used her new memoir to speak her mind”; four days later, the outlet wrote, Harris was desperately trying to “unburn the bridges.” The Hill adopted a similar line, but outsourced the task of giving voice to it to Democratic strategists said to be “frustrated” with Harris over a book intent on “picking fights and causing divisions at the worst possible time for the party.”

So what were these horribly divisive, bridge-burning, mind-speaking truths?

• Harris writes that California governor Gavin Newsom never returned her call after inquiries were made about his availability as VP: “Hiking. Will call back.” Harris relays her own laconic parenthetical remark: “He never did.”

• Harris notes her concerns about Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s ability to “settle for a role as number two”—Shapiro, too, had been tapped as a potential VP candidate—“and that it would wear on our partnership.”

• Harris criticizes Biden’s inner circle—not Biden himself—for failing to be as maximally supportive of her as she believed they could have been: “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”

• Harris doesn’t mince words about Biden’s infamous debate performance though claims she had no foreknowledge of his condition: “I had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.”

• Harris criticizes Tim Walz’s first on-stage appearance with her, when Walz clasped Harris’s hand in an “enthusiastic victory gesture,” but forgot to account for their height difference: “It felt like I was dangling from a jungle gym while wearing a suit.”

• Harris laments Walz’s vice-presidential debate with J.D. Vance, when Walz seemed taken in by Vance’s faux-folksy demeanor: “When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling … I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’”

But none of these observations are illegitimate; in fact, all of them seem like perfectly sensible things to write about in a campaign postmortem. They’re Harris’s truth, as she sees it, about how the campaign went—and they are not even particularly damning truths. Media portrayals of Harris as a “disloyal divider” seem driven more by the kinds of discrimination faced by women, and Black women in particular, in positions of power.

Harris herself would probably be the first to recognize it. “As the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second,” she writes at one point, “racism and sexism have always been present.”

The Tragedy of 107 Days

107 Days is an oddly riveting book despite the fact that we all know how it ends. The story of how we get there is well-paced. Even if the day-by-day diary structure does grow a bit stale by the end, suspense derives from observing a tragic arc unfold: a heroic protagonist filled with reasonable hope and a surprisingly theological righteousness—progressive pastors and soulful prayer abound here—is defeated by a malignant foe, Trump; his victory sparks the unmaking of the liberal order and the rise of an aggressively authoritarian nationalism. 107 Days is high-stakes tragedy.

And there is much to commend its protagonist in this book. Harris shows real stamina, endurance, and a fine-tuned sense of humor. She appears a savvy political operator, a kind of political anthropologist of Washington, D.C. (“I know how this town works”), where information is a prime commodity: “What you know and what you’re prepared to trade are the keys to power.” Devastating, too, and pointedly accurate, are Harris’s portrayals of the many ways in which Trump remains the most temperamentally unfit person ever to seek the U.S. presidency—from his refusal to even look at Harris during their televised debate, to pretending not to know how to pronounce her name (“Ka-mar-la, sometimes referred to as Kar-ma-la, you know, she’s got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name,” he claims, baselessly). And much more.

Harris is deeply critical, too, of Elon Musk’s role in the election. She notes that X became a powerful MAGA propaganda vehicle under Musk’s ownership, becoming his “personal megaphone for boosting Trump and denigrating me.” Unsurprisingly, Joe Rogan also comes off as deeply unreasonable, inventing excuses not to platform Harris on his podcast. Harris understands well the complex web of powerful media and tech players that helped propel Trump back into the White House.

Harris comes across as a politician without illusions with a canny knack for dissecting realities. And if her prosecutorial background brought, by her own admission, an exaggerated care for preparation and factuality (“I have been conditioned by my career to weigh my every word”)—probably not an advantage when facing someone as slippery as Trump—Harris’s earnestness feels refreshing.

Gaza, a Missing Reckoning

But what hasn’t Harris learned from the failure of those 107 fateful days? In a word: Gaza. Israel’s genocide was perpetrated with weapons and political cover supplied in large part by the Biden administration. But for such a defining, gruesome issue, Harris shows a remarkable lack of introspection or awareness, completely out of character with her otherwise shrewd political persona.

Harris acknowledges that Biden’s popularity tanked not just over his “age issue,” as she delicately phrases it, but his “perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.” But this wasn’t just a ”perceived” blank check: it was very much a real permission and facilitation. The very same White House administration that Harris was a part of offered the military, fiscal, and symbolic means for Netanyahu’s forces to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Harris does criticize Biden for his Gaza policy and claims she “pleaded with Joe” to “extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians. But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”

But then why, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden did she offer the infamous reply that “there is not a thing that comes to mind”? Even with the benefit of hindsight, Harris seems puzzled by her own remark. She berates herself, in stilted prose (“Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?”), but also claims she had “no idea” that she’d “just pulled the pin on a hand grenade” when she failed to distance herself from Biden during her appearance on the TV show The View, a mere month before the election.

Instead, when Harris recounts witnessing pro-Palestinian protesters at one of her rallies, her analysis seems oddly disconnected from how political motivations work: “I wished they would understand that sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.” But that’s just not how strongly motivated, single-issue voters operate. Thousands of voters cared deeply about Gaza and wanted their preferred candidate to do the same.

On the whole, one gets the sense that Harris still hasn’t dealt adequately with Gaza. The Democrats lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes. Harris hardly recognizes that a near-total identification with Biden’s Gaza policy in the eyes of many voters cost the Democratic Party dearly—not just among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, but among leftist voters in general, especially young progressives. These groups were demobilized by Democratic complicity—not perceived complicity, but real, tangible, bloody complicity—in the attempted destruction of a people.

This isn’t just empty speculation. It’s supported by hard polling data. As an Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) report based on YouGov data noted earlier this year, nearly 30 percent of people who reported voting for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 said that “’ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ was the top issue affecting their vote choice.” Gaza loomed much larger in the minds of many American voters than the Democratic establishment was willing to recognize or act upon. Even after Biden passed the torch to Harris, there was no substantive course correction on Gaza, no meaningful “daylight” between them—despite a few well-timed remarks about the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. It’s a key reason why Donald Trump now occupies the White House for the second time.

Defending Unabashed Progressivism

Less than a month before the election, Harris recounts a rehearsed debating line: “If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.” The infamous Liz Cheney maneuver was an attempt to curry favor with moderate Republicans, especially suburban women dismayed or repulsed by Trump. But centrist Democrats surely underestimated the vote-depressing effects of this rightward shuffle on their progressive constituencies (recall that nearly 90 million people didn’t vote—by far the largest party). What Democratic strategist had the bright idea of bringing onto the campaign Liz Cheney, whose father, Dick Cheney, was one of the principal architects of the Iraq War, in the midst of another violent Middle Eastern bloodletting from which the Harris campaign hadn’t sufficiently distanced itself? It was poor political craftsmanship, but also a failure of nerve—a lack of confidence that principled progressivism could win on its own terms.

The campaign’s waning resolve was also evident in Harris’s decision to select Walz for vice-presidential running mate over Pete Buttigieg, despite Harris’s preference for the latter. Heartbreakingly, Harris writes that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America. … Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” In hindsight, this seems like a mistake. Giving in to bigots and reactionaries only whets their appetite for further concessions. Liberals must defend an unabashed progressivism. Buttigieg is no radical, but his candidacy would have sent a message.

107 Days is light on policy but does suggest Harris lacked the economic-populist instincts—beyond the rhetoric and policy proposals—that would have stood the best chance of defeating Trump’s right-wing nationalist populism. Harris never managed to represent herself as a bona fide economic populist, despite a number of policy proposals moving in that direction.

Most tragedies and disasters are overdetermined: more factors are available than are needed to account for the final outcome. The 2024 U.S. presidential election is the most momentous election in recent memory. We need to study and scrutinize it. 107 Days is an important source in that effort. A critical reading suggests that Harris lost because of inaction on Gaza, a failure of resolve, and a diluted economic vision, at a time when voters demanded bigger, bolder action. Combine this with the titular short run (a product of Biden’s pride), as well as the forces stacked up on the other side, including the communicative power of the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, and Trump 2.0 begins to look like an inevitability.

The overarching political lesson I draw from 107 Days is that the center alone cannot hold: it shouldn’t be steering the ship or calling the shots on its own. Rolling back authoritarian populism, national conservatism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it—not just in the United States but around the world—will take broad center-left coalitions. But the stress must be placed on the left, not the center. More Mamdani, less Harris, if you will.

The Poverty of Abundance

Considering Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance carefully makes one thing clear: Abundance liberalism won't defeat fascism.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Avid Reader Press.

One way of thinking about Abundance might be to see it as a blueprint for a Democratic victory in 2028. Structured around five chapters, Klein and Thompson want to teach liberals how to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. At the core of their vision is the idea that the state needs to take on a more active role in helping build green energy or basic infrastructure and funding daring new scientific research.

There’s nothing particularly controversial about this. The economist Mariana Mazzucato showed in her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, how crucial government action is to forging dynamic, vibrant economies. (Klein and Thompson cite her work.) And there are genuinely sound ideas on display in Abundance: we do need more green energy, solar panels, high-density housing, high-speed rail, and spending on basic science that isn’t stifled by funding agencies. But is the vision bold enough to bring us to a true state of abundance? And can it puncture MAGA’s grip on power—or in a broader, global context, deflect the rise of the far right?

One is a question of the radicalism of the societal vision being proposed, the other a question of political strategy. What is ultimately dissatisfying about Abundance is that it neither seems utopian enough to live up to its titular promise, nor does it seem sufficiently responsive or well-timed enough to forge a new politics of the left capable of ejecting fascists from power.

Nothing New—and Not So Relevant

Despite its piecemeal merits, it is tempting to say that Abundance is a book “about nothing,” to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, in two very specific senses.

First, it’s about nothing new: as the authors themselves admit, Biden adopted much of the industrial-policy ethos that the authors spend a whole book advocating for. Klein and Thompson want a “Liberalism That Builds,” with government taking a more proactive role in supply-side interventions, either getting out of the way of market actors or rolling up its own sleeves for more direct involvement—in everything from building high-speed rail or microchip foundries to high-density housing and solar panel arrays.

But who needs to hear this? Certainly not centrist Democrats. As the authors admit, the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were motivated by this very same pro-“build” ethos. That Biden’s policies “represent a break with recent decades of American politics is undeniable,” they write. So who needs Abundance? “This book has offered a critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years,” the authors write in their conclusion—which is hardly politically apposite. What purpose is served by such a backward-looking prospectus? The authors rail against an orthodoxy—a version of the neoliberalism that extended from Reagan and the Bushes through Clinton to Obama, evolving along the way—that already seems passé.

Second, and relatedly, this is a book about nothing much of relevance to this political moment, which is, of course, dominated by Trump’s increasingly assertive fascist authoritarianism. It is a flaw of centrist liberalism that one could gaze out over the American social landscape of the first half of the 2020s and think that the core political problem facing progressives is one of overregulation. Klein and Thompson also offer no meaningful analysis of the other side, Trump’s MAGA movement. How do you beat the authoritarian nativism, the strategically deployed right-wing Christian nationalism, the creeping fascism? Surely not with bureaucratic downsizing—if anything, that’s part of the other side’s playbook.

This might seem to be a book for a Democratic presidency that never came to fruition. For Klein and Thompson’s message to truly have landed, one might think, Harris—or a Democratic contender like her—would have had to win in November 2024. But even then, its message would have been off-kilter. If anything, Abundance should have been written ten or fifteen years ago—pre-Trump 1.0 and, just as importantly, pre-Biden, whose political-economic sensibilities were, as Klein and Thompson note, transformed both by Trump’s first-term right-wing economic populism and, just as importantly, Bernie Sanders’ left-wing economic populism. The center of the Democratic Party has long since caught on to the core ideas defended here as if they were a new and dangerous heterodox creed.

In short, the book suffers from poor timing, both because of Democrats’ own ideological shifts, and the fraught politics it landed in. Appearing in March 2025, just as Musk’s DOGE army was rampaging through the U.S. federal government, Klein and Thompson were promoting a book that pushes for deregulation, especially of environmental protections and municipal zoning. In the very same moment that Musk and his cronies were busy tearing it all down, Klein and Thompson seemed to hammer away at the kinds of protections that liberals helped forge over multiple decades. Now, the authors might claim that Trump, Musk, and co. are more intent on destroying than building—but the convergences are disconcerting. When they take to task the Biden-era CHIPS Act’s funding for semiconductor foundries for asking how prospective projects “would include minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses . . . in their supply chain,” Klein and Thompson’s argument resonates uncomfortably with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI policies.

Abundance without Abundance

Klein and Thompson’s book has been pitched to the reading public as something that it is not: a blueprint for a (realistic) utopian, or even, we might say, cornucopian capitalism, overflowing with prosperity for all. Its glossy cover illustration envisions a clean, green, high-tech society, perched between urban high modernity and the demands of natural ecology; its introductory vignette, “Beyond scarcity,” sketches the kind of future society the authors want their readers to inhabit—but it feels more like Denmark of today than, say, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. It’s hardly a model for how to counteract far-right resurgence, deal with impending climate catastrophe or tamp down global social inequalities. The authors likely realize the oversold utopian dimension of their book—poorly matched by its contents—which is why they give a nod to Aaron Bastani’s (2019) Fully Automated Luxury Communism, though without deeper engagement with its closer attention to economic welfare, planning, and redistribution.

We might consider what Klein and Thompson omit from their vision. They seem unconcerned about proposals for a shorter working day or working week. They are uninterested in even modest redistributions of income and wealth or ideas like Universal Basic Income. There’s effectively nothing about free public healthcare here, in a country wracked by the extreme commodification of healthcare and soaring levels of medical debt; and nothing about student loan forgiveness or shoring up free higher education. The authors are unfazed by capitalism’s basic ecological problem, its infinite growth imperative—that is, the fact that market actors are constantly required to grow, despite clear planetary constraints; instead, we get a snide remark about “the degrowther movement,” and the need to avoid “regress,” betraying a lack of understanding of this intellectual movement’s true concerns.

What we get instead are tweaks around the margins—technological fixes like carbon removal—alongside repackaged Biden-era political-economic orthodoxies, rebranded as a bold new vision—and a hope that everything can go on as before, with minor adjustments and no real need for systemic change.

In fact, what Klein and Thompson propose isn’t really abundance at all: it’s capitalism with a human face—increasingly deregulated, though encapsulated by a moderately more activist state. Writing a book about how to “build a better future” in the United States in the first half of the 2020s without addressing the need for economic redistribution or free public healthcare seems injudicious.

At its core, Abundance might even be said to be a case of conceptual co-optation: the idea of abundance, more properly the preserve of radical progressives, is dragged rightward, to be held at center-ground. But this is political turf that seems to belong to democratic socialists—or social democrats—like Warren, Sanders, and Mamdani. It feels obvious that elevating politicians of their stripe is the left’s only real hope of fending off a MAGA victory in 2028. Ideally, a big-tent center-left could soak up the functional parts of Abundance worth keeping, while being propelled by the energy, enthusiasm, and credibility of real progressives, more attuned to the welfare needs and interests of ordinary people—and with bigger, bolder visions. But Abundance-style centrism alone? That won’t carry the day.

Review: Not Enough Fight

'Fight' by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offers a gripping account of the 2024 presidential election, placing blame on both Biden and Harris for Trump's victory.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2025). Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. William Morrow.

In Fight, veteran political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes guide us through one of the most momentous electoral campaigns in recent memory, offering a post-operative assessment of Kamala Harris’s whirlwind 107-day effort—launched in the wake of Biden’s less-than-stellar debate performance in late June 2024—and Trump’s third-iteration campaign machine that ultimately secured him a second term. Figuring out what went wrong with Harris’s campaign, and why Trump was successful after crashing so decisively in 2020, should be of essential interest to anyone to the left of fascism.

As Fight’s taut and surprisingly thrilling narrative makes clear, the odds were always stacked against Harris: forced into turbo mode, with little more than three months to convince the American people of her suitability for highest office, her campaign was rolled out under the shadow of a president still clinging to the throne—Biden, of course, wasn’t going anywhere. “Nobody walks away from this,” as one senior White House advisor is quoted as saying. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter”—a reminder of the banal material seductiveness of U.S. presidential power. Biden was unwilling, or unable, to let go and give Harris the necessary room to maneuver.

Could Biden’s avarice for power have cost the Democrats the White House? More positively, what could Biden have done to help Harris win? After the switch to Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee by late July, he could have resigned as president, handing over the presidential mantle to Harris and allowing her a share in the enormous prestige of the presidency, which might have given her a clearer shot at the White House. Less dramatically, he could have never opted to run for a second term in the first place, leaving the field open for a proper Democratic primary to run its course.

Hovering Biden

As political reporters, Allen and Parnes do not speculate about the what-if questions of alternate history, but they do offer a convincing implicit argument about the long arc of the Democrats’ election campaign—what I would describe as the “No Daylight Hypothesis.” From the outset of Harris’s late start, Biden made it clear—in paternalistic terms—that he would permit Harris no substantial deviation from a course already laid out by him:

To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him. “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.”

Their political fates were intertwined, their projects one and the same: even as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris was not to distance herself from her increasingly unpopular boss.

By the end of the summer, Biden had become the hoverer-in-chief, hanging over the Harris campaign, and on multiple occasions Biden directly undermined her efforts—perhaps most notably with the infamous “garbage” remark: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden had said during a live webcast that, incredibly, was scheduled to take place as Harris herself was delivering an important speech at the Ellipse. Biden claimed he was using the possessive, “his supporter’s,” singular, but it seems implausible. “At least Hillary Clinton had shown enough compassion to apply her ‘basket of deplorables’ label to only half of Trump’s base,” Allen and Parnes (hereafter A&P) write. “It was a gift,” one senior Trump aide says in the book, and Biden’s blunder stole the spotlight from Harris at a crucial final moment in the campaign. “Why are you doing anything public-facing during her speech?! Why are you competing with us, dude?” one senior Harris advisor vents to the authors.

While “no daylight” was probably sensible on the economic and cultural issues for which Biden was still sufficiently progressive to allow a repeat of 2020, tying Harris to his catastrophic position on Gaza was another matter altogether. Biden’s unwillingness to block the Netanyahu government’s genocidal policies in Gaza, continuing instead to provide extensive military and financial support to Israel, combined with Harris’s disinclination to distance herself from Biden’s position, was a devastating liability.

A&P report Harris’s aides’ claims that “behind the scenes,” she had “urged Biden to pay more attention to civilians in Gaza,” even if it “was not an issue that she raised publicly.” While difficult to assess, what we do know is that both as vice president and as presidential contender Harris made little effort to signal a change of course on Gaza—or even just to offer an outstretched hand to voters repelled by the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces. A&P describe the Gaza question as “the deepest, most painful rift in their party,” heading into the Democratic National Convention in August, but it was a rift neither Biden or Harris seemed at all interested in repairing. Harris’s steadfast continuation of support for Netanyahu’s government—a case of “no daylight” if there ever was one—surely contributed to her defeat. It likely suppressed the youth vote, and it pushed genocide-conscious voters into the arms of third-party candidates and even Trump himself, however misguidedly.

The Cheney Disaster

But A&P show that Harris’s problems went far beyond “no daylight,” emphasizing instead how Harris wielded agency and was an active participant in her campaign’s undoing. In particular, A&P are unenthusiastic about Harris’s decision to tack rightward and seek out disaffected Republican voters alienated by Trump’s MAGA extremism. The “Cheney experiment”—Harris’s cultivation of Liz Cheney during her late October “blue wall” tour—always seemed unlikely to succeed, if only because Harris and Cheney “made for strange political bedfellows, agreeing on virtually nothing but their disdain for Trump.” The strategy was perhaps well-intentioned, motivated by an attempt to “find new GOP voters—particularly suburban women—and attract media attention.” But just like Harris’s promise to include a Republican in her future cabinet, the Cheney experiment simply didn’t work. As The Nation’s John Nichols later observed, under the pointed headline “Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris,” her Republican courtship “added few if any votes to the Democratic total” and likely “alienated voters” who still remembered her father’s role in the disastrous Iraq War.

The Trump campaign made mistakes too, of course. In particular, the Madison Square Garden rally that included the MAGA-friendly comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, threatened to derail Trump’s rainbow strategy a little more than a week before Election Day. Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Puerto Ricans—at a time when Trump was courting Hispanic voters, including the nearly six million people who consider themselves to be of Puerto Rican descent in the continental United States—was described (understatedly) by one Trump adviser as a “staff error”:

We should be able to control everybody but the principal. If Donald Trump wants to get up there and say what he says, that’s his prerogative. But if a staffer invites some dipshit comedian, that’s a staff problem. And that’s where I get upset.

Given what Trump himself said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio allegedly “eating cats, dogs and geese” the month before, those faux-aggrieved words ring hollow. But A&P show a Trump campaign that, setting aside the content of its politics, was far from technically perfect—a point easily forgotten given the final outcome.

In the Comms Shop

One thing the Trump team likely did better than Harris was its mastery of both national and local messaging. The Harris campaign was too nationally oriented, A&P write, often seeming to run a “campaign for Axios and Politico,” as one advisor put it, while Trump did well on both levels. “He obviously had a national message, but when he would go to states, he was so good at talking about local wedge issues in a way that we never could,” a Harris campaign official is quoted as saying. “Our leadership was always very adamant that everything was about national message.” Clearly, that was a mistake: contemporary political communication demands not just a coherent overarching message, but segmentation and specificity, tailoring narratives to target particular groups.

While Fight could have brought us deeper into the comms shop, de-emphasizing the candidates-in-themselves and recentering the massive communications operations that went into securing Trump’s victory (and, perhaps, ensuring Harris’s failure), including the technical solutions that lay behind them, A&P do give tantalizing glimpses of the considerable spin-doctoring that went on behind the scenes. Trump’s transgender attack ad is a case in point. The 30-second ad revolving around the transphobic message, “Kamala is for they/them. I am for you,” was depressingly successful: the New York Times reported that it “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it,” and it “aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states,” according to NPR, in the final weeks of the election.

Here Fight turns into a case study in MAGA communications, which started with a question raised by one of Trump’s PR strategists: “What’s the craziest thing we’ve got on her?”. Answer: Harris’s response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire where she—to her infinite credit—“pledged to make sure that transgender people who relied on the government for medical care—including those in prison and in immigration detention—would be able to have surgeries at taxpayer expense.” It was catnip to the Trump campaign, and the team ran through several attack-ad iterations, including Trump’s personal sign-off on the wording. The ad aired “during NFL games and later the World Series,” and it “used Harris’s own words to show her as a potential danger to voters. Soft on gender. Soft on crime. Soft on immigration. Reckless with taxpayer dollars,” the authors write. “In other words, she was an extremist.”

Too Little, Too Long

Of course, Harris wasn’t an extremist—that’s the whole point, and in part, the problem. Especially toward the end of the campaign, Harris seemed to pull rightward, or pull her punches, fearing she would be perceived as an extremist—though in the end, the Trump campaign ended up smearing her as one anyway.

Frustratingly, in purely policy terms, Harris had a strong economic populist streak. She carried forward elements from Sanders’ energizing 2016 and 2020 campaigns and Biden’s progressive economic stance. Released in early September, a Harris campaign ad, “Focused,” embodied all the tenets of economic populism, pledging to tackle “economic speculators” and “price gouging,” while attacking Trump for offering “tax cuts for big corporations.” A week earlier, Harris had promised to build 3 million new homes and offer a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers, a “nod to the party’s populist mood,” in the words of a Washington Post commentator—but perhaps more than just a nod.

Still, something changed toward the end of her campaign: The economic populism went quietly slinking out the back door. “The campaign’s closing message centered more than anything on . . . the defense of democracy and the danger Trump posed to it,” as one analysis put it. She attended town hall meetings with the aforementioned Cheney, where there was much talk of rallying to “support and defend the Constitution”—undoubtedly an important point, but one that entailed a more muted emphasis on economic issues. The billionaire Mark Cuban was enlisted as a campaign surrogate, and recent reporting even suggests he was asked to submit for vetting as vice-presidential contender. Harris swung toward center-ground, probably more in terms of communication than actual policy substance, but the loss of nerve in messaging on the economy was ill-conceived. Pandering to that ever-dwindling demographic, the moderate conservative, she was also, to many on the left’s utter bewilderment, unwilling to speak up on Gaza. It cost her.

But in a way, by the late summer of 2024 it may already have been too late. The lesson I draw from Fight is that Harris never really stood a real chance. More time wouldn’t have helped: there was a moment in October where Harris’s numbers were solid across multiple swing states, and had the election taken place then, in some counterfactual universe, she might have eked out a victory. In a way, 107 days was both too much time—and too little.

For ultimately, it was Biden who sealed his party’s fate by deciding to run a second time around in November 2022—his “worst strategic decision” in the words of one commentator. Fight relays the words of a “former high-ranking government official who is close to both Biden and Obama,” who by July 2024 believed Biden had “damned his party by committing ‘the original sin’ of running for a second term.” By the summer of 2024, following the fateful late June debate with Trump, it was probably too late in the game to change Democratic horses: The time to give someone else a chance to run lay back in 2022, but Biden’s pride had led him to seek renewed power. When Donald Trump was shot on July 13th, the Democrats’ fate was certain. Harris’s only chance would have been to remain firmly progressive, but for this she lacked either the personal inclination or the maneuvering room—or both. Lesson learned, one hopes.

Between MAGA and a Hard Place

Two books — one on Steve Bannon and the global far right, the other on life at a Chinese university — reveal a world increasingly riven by ideological contestation. Fukuyama's "end of history" is most definitely over.

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020). War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Penguin Books.

Daniel A. Bell (2023). The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Princeton University Press.

Published half a decade ago now, War for Eternity examines the rise of the new right, including the alt-right or “populist nationalist” movement, via key figures like Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and a smattering of other far-right characters from across the globe. Sadly, the book remains even more relevant now, five years later, under Trump 2.0.

Despite the wide cast of characters, Bannon is really the key player here. The US edition’s subtitle underscores the book’s Bannon-centricity, “Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers”—which is depersonalized in the UK edition, whose subtitle, “The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right,” offers a more intellectualist, “history of ideas” framing.

Benjamin Teitelbaum sketches Bannon’s intellectual formation through his (apparent) encounter with Traditionalism, an obscurantist ideology that combines, in varying degrees, spiritualism, esotericism, occultism, reactionary conservatism, and racial supremacism, via key figures like the fascist philosopher Julius Evola and the mystical metaphysician René Guénon.

A breezy read, Teitelbaum’s book is at its best when offering a richly textured portrayal of Bannon’s worldview. Bannon was and remains—via his influential War Room podcast, CPAC speeches, and global networking—a key MAGA ideologue. Famously, Bannon was ousted from the first Trump administration in mid-2017 after falling out with the Trump family: Jared Kushner and Ivanka are denounced by Bannon here for wanting to “maintain the status quo,” with Kushner described as a “centrist Democrat” in Teitelbaum’s retelling.

Bannon’s formal removal from power hasn’t stopped him from remaining essential to understanding both Trump’s first and second terms—and hence the world we all inhabit. Teitelbaum has had significant access to Bannon, to a lesser extent the Russian writer Aleksandr Dugin, documenting (retroactively, through interviews) their first encounter in Rome in November 2018, which appears now as a key event in the growing interweaving of Putinism and Trumpism.

Coming to this book five years after its publication, War for Eternity now feels less relevant in the extensive sections on the far-right philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, a significant influence on Bolsonaro—if only because Brazil’s former president now is finished, politically, and because the country appears to have turned a new page with Lula since 2023.

More importantly, in places, Teitelbaum’s book feels just a bit too bewitched with its main character, as indeed other reviewers have noted. Bannon morphs into just plain “Steve.” The price of proximity and extraordinary access is the risk of (involuntary) glorification, and serving as a conduit for Bannon’s own propagandistic worldview and account of Trump’s first term. We are never quite told why Bannon would offer the author access to his “circle of global power brokers”—what’s in it for “Steve”? Could it be that he hopes to gain respectability, a serious platform for his dangerous, divisive, and destructive views? This is a constant dilemma in journalism. But in War for Eternity, proximity at times drifts into at least the appearance of entrancement.

There’s also the risk of sanewashing, or ex post facto rationalizing, an ideological movement that is, at its core, aggressively simplistic, premised on hardline nationalism and reactionary values. The intellectualization of “Traditionalism” produces the illusion of ideological depth and historicity. But maybe Bannon himself has it right: “I’m just some fuckin’ guy, making it up as I go along.”

A Dean of Illiberalism

The Dean of Shandong, styled as the “confessions of a minor bureaucrat at a Chinese university,” is an at-times amusing collection of somewhat trifling essays, written by the Canadian political theorist and long-time China resident Daniel A. Bell (not to be confused with the earlier American sociologist Daniel Bell). One of the essays, for instance, asks why Chinese political leaders have felt compelled to dye their hair (short answer: to maintain the appearance of youthfulness and vigor)—and why Xi now appears to have abandoned the practice (though he may be dyeing in streaks of gray, Bell notes). It’s a smart, Erving Goffman–style attention to sociological detail.

But behind its seemingly trifling qualities, there is a great seriousness here, for Bell, a scholar of Confucianism, offers a kind of Confucian apologia for China’s system of governance. It’s an at times sycophantic narrative, all the more efficacious coming from an outsider born and raised in a high-functioning liberal democracy like Canada: If one wanted to mount a defense of the Confucian-“communist”-capitalist synthesis that is contemporary China, this one-time dean’s unconventional essays would surely be just the sort of thing one would want to put out there: lighthearted, quirky, yet essentially reconciled with the basic ideological parameters of the state from which it arises.

Bell has lived in China for decades, employed first as professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University (while eccentrically owning a Thai restaurant, Purple Haze, popular among expats in the Chinese capital), before being tapped by the mighty Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which annually presides over millions of appointments in the country’s sprawling public sector, to serve as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Shandong University—a newer, provincial university, but still something of a promotion: Few Westerners have ever been hired as deans, Bell observes. (He has since moved on to Hong Kong University.)

Of course, one has to ask why Bell was chosen for this post. The answer probably isn’t solely academic: Bell is also an effective propagandist of sorts. While he avers to be critical of China’s political system—and there are asides on corruption, Uyghur and Tibetan repression, and the “possibility of a return to Maoist-style personal dictatorship” after the abolition of term limits in 2018, initiating the era of Xi—the book is, as noted, a concise defense of the Chinese system. Bell doesn’t try to conceal these aims. As he readily admits,

I do have an agenda and I should come clean about normative commitments. I worry about the demonization of China and especially of its political system. I think much thinking and policy making in Western countries is based on crude stereotypes about China’s political system, such as the view that the CCP exercises total control over intellectual discourse and there is no room for independent thinking. The reality is much more complex, as I hope to show.

And he appears willing to make some concessions to China critics:

I most certainly do not want to deny that increased demonization is related to worrisome developments in Chinese politics over the past decade or so. The CCP—to a certain extent—has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.

Other reviewers have approved of Bell’s charge that, in the words of the Financial Times’s critic, “western critics of China are often ignorant of the pros and cons of China’s system,” nevertheless, Bell’s own qualifiers often seem like a hedge intended to preempt criticism of what remains his essentially illiberal stance. Bell is no democrat: Except at the lowest levels of governance (e.g., “village councils”), where the stakes are less significant, Bell thinks China’s system of top-down corporatist governance is superior to Western liberal democracy. And he wants to foreground the system’s Confucianism: Bell half-jokingly thinks the CCP should be rebranded the Chinese Confucian Party when engaging abroad.

Bell’s controversial 2015 book, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, mounted a longer defense of the Chinese model of governance, which he describes as a “political meritocracy” (a normative ideal, Bell recognizes, that the country does not live up to), and dismisses Western liberal democracy, under the formula “one person, one vote.” In a TED talk outlining his position, Bell describes how his sister in Canada thinks him “brainwashed” after having living “too long” in China. But one could just as easily flip it around, Bell says, and claim that it is she who has been brainwashed from having lived in the West for too long. Demonization is never good, but this sort of equivocating misses the mark. (Bell is an oddly charming speaker, and he jokes that he hopes his sister never sees the YouTube recording of his talk.)

And while the twice-election of Donald Trump has given new force to Bell’s criticism of liberal democracy—in essence, the Popperian observation that such a system can run itself into the ground—it’s hard to see why the answer to liberalism’s potential for self-defeat should be to roll over and implement an authoritarian “meritocracy”: That’s cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Meritocracy, moreover, is rarely as meritorious as its advocates suggest; the term was invented as an essentially satirical concept in the 1950s by the sociologist Michael Young to skewer unfolding political developments.

In the face of liberal democracy’s frailties, surely the answer should be more politics, not less—including encouraging citizens to engage in the (civic) educative experience of activism, and the strengthening of public media and systems of public education. That’s how you make populations less susceptible to the “mind bomb” of Trumpist propaganda.

Removing the people from the political equation isn’t meritocracy; it’s a recipe for oligarchy, or rule by the few, and aristocracy. And that may be just what Bell wants: In closing, he even advocates for a China led by a “symbolic monarch,” selected from Confucius’s present-day descendants.

A World Divided

Two very different books, then: one broaching the ideological merger between Bannonite MAGA-ism and Dugin-inflected Putinism, the other a defense of China’s illiberal system of governance, packaged as a light tale of bureaucratic woes at a provincial university. Can they tell us anything about our current geopolitical moment?

Whatever the rest of the world might think about it, China is committed to all three elements of its ideological mélange—Confucianism, Marxism, and free-market capitalism. This seemingly self-contradictory yet socio-economically coherent and powerful system—a form of “Communist capitalism” with Confucian values—makes China the only real contender for present-day U.S. hegemony.

Moreover, Trump’s ideological allies are eager to forge a union of far-right movements—not only with Putin’s Russia but also with other countries and continents—to remake the world in their image, which includes countering, even crushing, China. Bannon is far from the only MAGA ideologue to champion this position—see, for example, Peter Navarro’s numerous anti-China screeds. The wheels are being set in motion.

Both books suggest—perhaps unintentionally—the very real possibility of an impending U.S.-China confrontation, already unfolding in the form of an escalating trade war, sparked by Trump’s recent tariffs. What makes this confrontation so dangerous—beyond the scale of people, weaponry, and productive capacity involved—is its fundamentally ideological, almost spiritual, nature. There’s no hatred like odium theologicum, the special animus directed at an opposing worldview.

But while these systems of thought are inimical to one another, a “clash of civilizations” was never inevitable: It only appears unavoidable now because of the specific people who have risen to power and the ideologies they’ve developed and come to inhabit.

Whither Europe?

Quite where this leaves Europe is unclear. Unless the European continent manages to counter the rise of the far-right at home—worryingly, a recent poll shows that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now Germany’s most popular party—Europe risks being swept up in a U.S.-Russia “spiritual union” under Trump and Putin.

Joining (economic) forces with China, as China itself has suggested in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, will be difficult given China’s professed “no-limits friendship” with Russia and its wider system of governance—though perhaps a pragmatist like von der Leyen will turn a blind eye to some of the issues and concentrate on trade and commerce instead; as The Economist notes, an EU-wide “rebalancing” may be in the works. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez’ proposed “pivot to China,” as Bloomberg describes it, with a visit to Beijing in the wake of the Trump tariffs, is a hint in this direction.

What seems clear is that we now inhabit a world of increasingly antagonistic ideological formations and geopolitical rivalries, with multiple possible configurations in the time ahead. The Fukuyamite hypothesis has most definitely been falsified: History is far from over, and a number of potential confrontations are now on the horizon. In this context, a Europe that (metaphorically) soldiers on alone—freed from a far-right “fifth column” at home, and managing to stave off Trump’s global MAGA machinations—seems increasingly like the sanest of outcomes. Whether that will be enough to sustain the better parts of liberal democracy in the long run remains to be seen.

What’s the Matter with Kentucky?

Are Trumpists found—or created? A ground-level report from eastern Kentucky by the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild only tells half the story of how Trump’s MAGA base came into being.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.

Now Hochschild has moved north. With Stolen Pride, Hochschild applies her signature brand of empathetic ethnography to try to disentangle the knot of Trump’s enduring appeal. Zooming in on an especially rural and red slice of America, Kentucky’s 5th congressional district and its constituent Pike County, Hochschild tries to unpack the mentalities and emotions underpinning Trump’s appeal in the region (and beyond). In the district we encounter here, KY-5, described by some as the “heart of Appalachia,” Trump won around 80 percent of the vote in all three of the last presidential elections. One way of thinking about Stolen Pride is as a kind of Hillbilly Elegy for the liberal intelligentsia, a Thomas Frank-style What’s the Matter with Kansas?, transplanted two states over and less economically, more culturally, oriented.

Good and Bad Bullies

The results, unfortunately, are mixed. Stolen Pride’s insistently restrictive framing of Pike County’s political psychology as that of a contest between “shame” and “pride,” brings to mind an amusing scene from the movie Donnie Darko, where one of the characters, a teacher, presents an idiosyncratic theory that all of life is a contest between “fear” and “love”—in other words, a reductive framing that misses much else of relevance.

In Stolen Pride, readers are told repeatedly that the fundamental problem facing eastern Kentuckians, and by extension Trump supporters in other (somewhat) economically backward areas, is one of a lack of pride and an excess of shame. They are unable to take pride in their economically depressed, coal-abandoned regions; they have been shamed for their refusal to adopt progressive cultural values, and they have been left pride-less by the machinations of “globalization.”

Enter Donald Trump, the book suggests, who alone has shown himself able to restore their pride and take away their shame. He is the “good bully” (p. 205), from the perspective of MAGA voters, willing to protect Kentuckians from the “bad bully”—a shadowy quadrumvirate made up of “the Democratic Party, CNN, the federal government (apart from the military), and the defenders of urban America who rudely dismiss rural America” (p. 206). End of story, more or less.

Narrative and Reality

But Hochschild never considers why key signifiers like “pride” and “shame” get freighted with the meaning they do: Why does pride in this region automatically entail “independence from government authority,” as one of her interviewees reports (p. 150)? Why does “shame” emanate from the closure of coal mines lying decades in the past when the rest of the postindustrialized world has moved on and become, precisely, postindustrial? And why wasn’t it Biden instead who was able to appear to these residents as the good “bully” (if we are to accept this schoolyard metaphor as meaningful way of thinking about high-stakes politics), who stood up to the bad “bully” Trump—a seemingly much more resonant, sensible framing from the left-liberal standpoint?

The basic problem with Stolen Pride is that Hochschild, by and large, doesn’t attend to the political and social activation of feeling as a “mass emotion,” steered and shaped by political actors and the media. Historians sometimes call this memory politics—in other words, how consciousness of the past is shaped and activated by political actors. And while there’s a great deal of shared memory and nostalgia on display in Stolen Pride, there is rather less reflexive questioning of the memory politics involved in propelling certain narrative strands to the forefront of the public mind.

In fact, right-wing politicians are left with very little communicative agency at all in this book: All they can do, seemingly, is to capture and project, bullhorn-style, the public’s preexisting feelings, uncovered at ground level. Trump and the vast communicative ecosystem surrounding him are not only strangely lacking in independent powers to persuade and give shape to public opinion, but are simply missing in action here, essentially nowhere to be found in the pages of Stolen Pride.

When Hochschild asks her interviewees about “the right’s deep story,” or overarching meta-narrative, she does not stop to consider who might be the storyteller in this saga. Who concocted and spread the “deep story”? Surely not eastern Kentuckians alone. When Hochschild implicitly asks us, as readers, to reflect upon the allure of Trump as “the good bully,” against the “bigger and badder” bullies of the “Democratic Party and the federal government,” the only appropriate response seems to be that of the very consternation Hochschild reports among her friends on the left:

Who was the first bully? . . . Wasn’t Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill giving good jobs to people nationwide?

Indeed. There’s a “deep story” liberal-minded people could tell about a state like Kentucky as well—one in which the state’s economy is doing reasonably well, unemployment remains relatively low (5.2% statewide in December 2024, “lower than the state’s almost-50-year historical average of 6.5 percent,” as a recent policy brief notes), and where Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was able to capture the governorship in 2019— a fact which Hochschild alludes to in the concluding chapter but leaves largely unanalyzed.

We shouldn’t, of course, blame the messenger: Clearly, it isn’t Hochschild’s fault that her informants have bought into the lie of the 2020 “stolen election” or, more generally, hold reactionary views. And it isn’t the job of ethnographers, for the most part, to condemn their subjects.

But Hochschild does insist on Explaining Trumpism—behind this book’s pretense at anthropological particularity, it remains a sweeping argument about cultural driving forces in U.S. politics, concealed as fine-grained journalism. In her framing, Hochschild lends symbolic authority to ideas about “pride” and “shame” that are themselves the products of Trump’s own messaging. While Hochschild’s demand-sided account repeatedly suggests that there is an organic appetite for resentment in the population, a more supply-sided theory would recognize that the art of late-modern politics is about the creation and activation of resentments.

Hochschild doesn’t make room for this other half of the equation. In Stolen Pride, the author presents a micro-level view, without pausing to ask how narratives filter down from above and transform the view from below. Trump’s MAGA makeover of the American political landscape was the result of a relentless communicative bombardment, at all levels of the media ecosystem, from tweets and Truths to Fox & Friends. Hugging the ground provides only a partial glimpse of this wider story.

What Winning Takes

For Democrats to win elections in red states like Kentucky, one might think it would be enough to promise more economic populism and stronger reconstruction programs, including Ezra Klein-style abundance policies, as the historian Rutger Bregman has recently argued. Hochschild’s book also veers onto this ground, if not in so many words. If the central problem is that coal jobs have disappeared (inducing shame), the solution might seem to be to bring back jobs (producing pride).

The trouble is that both Biden and Harris already promised and pursued this sort of agenda to a significant degree. Biden secured $1.6 trillion in green and infrastructure spending; and while Bidenomics was hampered by the failure to pass Build Back Better, spin-off legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were clear attempts to strengthen the economic base. Harris’s 2024 campaign—though more moderate than her 2020 primary run when Harris supported more radical, sweeping legislation like Medicare for All—still promised around $5 trillion in tax increases over a decade aimed at corporations and the wealthy.

Clearly, this is not yesterday’s neoliberalism. Democrats learned from Trump 1.0, but also Bernie Sanders’s popular 2016 presidential campaign.

What Democrats couldn’t properly contend with was the toxic, decade-long MAGA-fueled inculcation of nativist, reactionary narratives that obscured their economic record and set tens of millions of Americans on a direct collision course with basic humanist values.

Perhaps this is a form of “stolen pride” Hochschild could give a hearing in future work: The once-proud belief in a uniquely American dynamism, driven by immigration and diversity; and pride in the country’s liberal-democratic values, from “checks and balances” to the right not to be abducted by plainclothes agents in broad daylight or deported to an offshore supermax prison without cause.

Yes, these ideals were always in part illusory: Internally a fractured and imperfect democracy, the U.S. was and is also an aggressive overseas imperial power. (Read Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers for a capsule view of the postwar record, seen through the actions of John Foster and Alan Dulles.)

But both Americans and the wider world are coming to discover just how much even those purported values will be missed as they fade from view. It’s a sorrowful tale of something of great value that has been taken away from the world.

Millions of people are ashamed, too, to return to Hochschild’s parlance, that these things are now being stolen from them.

Reclaiming Narrative Hegemony

Shame isn’t necessarily all bad. Longing for the Confederacy’s defense of slavery, for instance, ought to induce a sense of shame. Part of the left’s cultural-hegemonic work must be to ensure that xenophobia, misogyny and other reactionary positions do in fact engender a proper sense of loathing—the sense that this sort of thing simply isn’t done. One could call this “identity politics” or “wokeism”; in other words, basic civility and humanism.

As the right cements its grip on power around the world, there’s a growing realization that the left needs to win the narrative war. Hearts and minds are being shaped daily by people like Joe Rogan and on platforms like TikTok and X. The left lacks its own counter-messaging apparatus attuned to these times. The cultural momentum has been lost.

What’s needed now is to reclaim lost cultural ground, build new narratives, and counteract the right’s successful messaging. Unfortunately, Stolen Pride, with its partial view and restrictive framing, offers little guidance for what comes next.

The AI Hype Bubble

And its cognitive, social, and financial risks.

The promise of Artificial (General) Intelligence is the greatest hype bubble this side of the new millennium.

Huge checks are being cashed on the promise of AI’s profitability. The chip manufacturer Nvidia currently has a market cap of 3 trillion dollars, making it the second-most valuable company in the world. Its bloated valuation stems in large part from the ongoing AI revolution, which has sent demand for graphics-processing chips like those made by Nvidia soaring. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was valued at an astonishing $340 billion in early 2025. And there’s little sign that investments in the technology are letting up. Four tech titans—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft—plan on pouring more than $300 billion into AI in 2025 alone. Clearly, there’s lots of loose capital floating around for those willing and able to get aboard the AI hype train.

But beyond the bloated market caps and overinflated investment drives—no different in essence from past speculative bubbles, from Dutch tulips to dotcom startups in the Y2K era, the“irrational exuberance” of stock overvaluation, in Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase—a growing chorus is asking: Where is the value in AI, both in the narrow economic and wider social sense?

So far at least, the AI revolution has been characterized by two countervailing tendencies: on the one hand, an enormous willingness to invest in the booming AI industry (fueled in part by the fear of being “left behind”), and, on the other hand, extremely meager returns in any substantive, meaningful sense of that term. As the Boston Consulting Group noted last October, tackling the narrower financial meaning, “After all the hype over artificial intelligence (AI), the value is hard to find.”

Is AI making us more productive? Is it resulting in better-quality outputs? Is it solving real-world problems at a scale and with a degree of accuracy and quality commensurate with its significant energy usage and fiscal investments?

The answer to all of those questions, in my opinion, is no, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. As the economist Daron Acemoglu has argued, AI’s productivity contribution will likely be no more than 0.5 percent in total over the next decade. “I don’t think we should belittle 0.5 percent in 10 years,” Acemoglu has said. “That’s better than zero. But it’s just disappointing relative to the promises that people in the industry and in tech journalism are making.” And it’s particularly disappointing given the trillions of dollars and hundreds of terawatt-hours AI-driven industries aim to absorb in the years ahead. As ever, we need to ask about opportunity costs: What might humanity have accomplished were these resources used differently?

By now, the Internet is chock-full of stories of how AI has failed to deliver in a social, less economic, sense. One basic issue is that of generative AI’s proneness to error. LLMs struggle with truth and with correspondences between text and reality. Hallucinations aren’t incidental to LLMs—they’re inherent. Hallucinations aren’t contingent bugs to be ironed out in some future iteration, given “better” data (but from where?): They’re an ontological, or necessary, feature of the tech involved.

Now, humans left to their own devices will always commit errors, and the tolerance for errors is itself variable: The range of acceptable error differs significantly for an AI (or a human) when writing a college term paper, say, or helping land a passenger jet, or detecting cancerous growths. Still, we may soon inhabit a Brazil-like world of half-broken technologies always in need of (impossible) repairs: In Terry Gilliam’s absurdist 1985 movie Brazil, we confront a dystopian future in which nothing works the way it ought to, its futuristic infrastructure held together by little more than duct tape, anarchic subterfuge, and a semi-resigned willingness to accept catastrophic error as a built-in feature of daily life.

Catastrophic errors, confidently pronounced, are likely to become our future as well. Last year, a Purdue study found that ChatGPT provided erroneous answers to programming questions in 52% of cases. What happens once those errors find their way into our society’s basic infrastructure?

More comically, I was recently scolded by ChatGPT for claiming that Donald Trump was president of the United States: “Trump is no longer in office,” the large-language model cheerily pronounced. But hallucinations are no laughing matter: They’re already having real-world consequences. A Norwegian man recently filed a complaint demanding that OpenAI be fined after ChatGPT erroneously claimed that he had murdered his own children. What if someone had acted on those mistaken claims? An Australian passenger traveling to Chile was recently told by ChatGPT that he would not need a visa to enter the country (“You can enter visa-free”), which was wrong.

In academia—a world that, at least in theory, revolves around the distinction between truth and falsehood—the effects are becoming particularly noticeable. University libraries are being overrun by students in search of fictitious sources— books and articles that simply do not exist—that have been recommended to them by chatbots. Worryingly, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which conducts research on sensitive technologies, had to warn its users against the threat of fake citations, including the “higher chance” of encountering “‘ghost’ or ‘hallucinated’ references” in published works. Back in January 2023, I called this AI’s propensity to produce “credible nonsense”—that is, plausible-sounding outputs with little or no connection to really-existing reality.

More what we read, including scientific publications, is increasingly shot through with AI-generated content. Here, for instance, is a book chapter published by Springer containing three instances of the ChatGPT-derived phrase “Certainly! Here is the translated text,” likely pasted directly from the platform’s prompt—just a tiny example of how LLM-speak filters its way into the intellectual sphere. Princeton University academics last year tried to assess Wikipedia’s proportion of AI-generated articles and arrived at an estimate of around 5 percent. Estimates of this kind will always be uncertain because of the essential camouflage of LLM-ed output, but it seems likely that the level of AI-written content will only increase. Worryingly, a Columbia Journalism Review-affiliated study found that AI platforms provided erroneous sources in more than 60 percent of the researchers’ queries. The CJR’s piece was titled, simply, “AI Search Has A Citation Problem.” Moreover, this error-proneness is a danger to AI itself: As LLMs begin to “ingest” synthetic but mistake-riddled outputs as part of their training data, the result may be be an “unintentional feedback loop” of ever-worsening outputs, as one researcher wrote in the New York Times last year.

More and more evidence suggests that AI will have ruinous effects on already whittled-away powers of concentration, reading, writing, and thinking. The “loss of decision-making” as younger generations increasingly come to rely on AI could plausibly cause a reduction in overall human intelligence.

The key issue is that we essentially hone our intelligence by engaging in intelligence-demanding activities; but AI reduces our need to do so (so-called cognitive offloading), and so, the chance to develop basic skills like wading through lengthy writings, summarizing lectures or reading materials, and writing unaided by technology. AI could be useful for older generations who have already developed the requisite skills but will likely wreak havoc on younger people’s cognitive capacities—and the world they will ultimately create and inhabit.

But in the near-term, the real risks from the AI hype bubble are financial, which is to say structural to the world economy. As the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital’s analyst David Cahn reiterated last summer: “Where is all the revenue?”. While Cahn had found that by late 2023, AI industries would have had to generate $200 billion in revenues, by the end of 2024, $200-billion-dollar question had now become “AI’s $600B question.” While Cahn ultimately believed “it will be worthwhile” and that “speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of,” others are not so bullish.

Ali Baba’s Joe Tsai recently warned of an AI data center construction bubble: Centers are being built en masse with an unclear customer base. Similarly, the billionaire investor Roy Dalio likened “investor exuberance over artificial intelligence” to the “build-up to the dotcom bust at the turn of the millennium,” the FT reported earlier this year. As an essay in The American Prospect on “bubble trouble” notes, “If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.”

That’s a big “if,” of course. But the question is worth asking more forcefully than it has been so far. With hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investments slated for the next few years, there will have to be significant returns lest the hype bubble burst, leaving governments and the public to foot the bill for the inevitable post-implosion cleanup. Sleepwalking into a hype-driven meltdown just doesn’t seem very intelligent.