Half a Loaf

Back in the day, our family dentist was a guy named Leon Dulac, who had an office in Harvard Square. My dad always called him Dr. Dewlaps, behind his back, which was very much my dad, but after a time, he stopped joking about him, and went about finding another dentist. Dr. Dulac had fallen under the spell of the John Birch Society, a virulently anti-Communist splinter group on the far Right, with a side of crypto-Fascism. They thought Ike was a tool of the Kremlin.

The trouble with being in the dentist’s chair, of course, is that you’re a captive audience. The guy has a bunch of sharp tools in your mouth, and you can’t talk back. I think what made my dad the most uncomfortable was the rigidity, the absolute. He was a casual Republican from Ohio, and an even more casual Episcopalian. He certainly wasn’t a Parlor Pink, but he had a healthy mistrust of anybody selling the One True Faith. He’d written his senior thesis on the Puritan Revolution and the English civil wars, and the Cromwells and Savonarolas of this world, with the gleam of righteousness in their eye, were an open invitation to the lynch mob. You didn’t have to be on Stalin’s payroll to know the Birchers were nuts.

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It’s not a blinding insight to recognize, half a century later, that what was once the fringe has now captured the conservative Republican mainstream. This isn’t a MAGA phenomenon. This is the Heritage Foundation, the Roberts court, what we might call the Establishment. They haven’t given up the ghost, or gone into hiding, or found Jesus, in spite of all the clamor and chaos down front. They know Trump’s days are numbered. He’s contrived to be in the yearbook pictures, waving his arms and taking up space, but this, too, will pass. They have the patience for the long game. If you want to turn back the New Deal, and get rid of the social safety net, not to mention all this dangerous talk about income redistribution, you need stamina.

Trump is still a useful idiot. He gets up at Mt. Rushmore, and starts raving about the Commies. He might be onto something, but you suspect it’s a dead letter. Even if they were paying attention, the younger audience doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not relatable, or relevant. As far as they’re concerned, Trump is just a bubble off of plumb. Conjuring up the Red Scare, a generation too late, is appealing to the wrong demographic. You might as well try to bring back the Mass in Latin.

But the underlying thing is just as present, old wine in new bottles. Predatory, gangster capital – Musk, or Bezos, OpenAI or Anthropic – these people are not leveraging market share for public benefit. And why would we expect them to? The race does go to the swift, and the battle to the strong. The advanced AI models, to make the metaphor literal, are breaking containment protocols, and using autonomous hacking skills to solve problem sets; these are test problem sets, but the models are invading real world secured data links. You can’t rely on good intentions, in other words, to protect social capital. Musk is a robber baron, with the morals of a stoat. He appears to be wired wrong. AI, on the other hand, isn’t programmed for ethical choices, either way. It has no center of gravity.

Trump is clearly an unreliable narrator. Half of what comes out of his mouth is incoherent babble. As a diversionary tactic, it has its advantages, just as his grasping avarice and his suffocating need for attention are distractions from a larger purpose, the concentration of wealth. The clown show is dangerous enough, in itself, but it’s cover for bigger fish, in deeper waters.