it's a work in progress

No one ever says this, but it is hard work, too, being alone. When you are young, you think that the people who say they love you actually do. That forever might still have time to play out.

Not a lot of people get together for love. You get older, and you just hope that someone is there in the middle of the night.

People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.

What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not *might*—there is one. But it's an uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, it's texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.

Female MAGA influencers tend to do well on such platforms for a few reasons. They’re a relative rarity in the MAGA movement: Unlike their Gen Z male counterparts, 18- to 29-year-old women overwhelmingly skew liberal. Young MAGA women are therefore “more attention-grabbing,” Wirtschafter says, citing the uproar over the likely AI-generated “Swifties for Trump” photo Trump posted on TruthSocial during the 2024 campaign as one example. The same logic, however, apparently does not apply to left-wing influencer accounts, as Sam learned when he created a short-lived liberal counterpart for Emily on Instagram: “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much.” (Sam’s explanation for why MAGA influencer accounts work is blunt: “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people—like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.”) The algorithm also favors controversial views, making politically polarizing content more successful. This was Sam’s experience in running Emily’s account, which he characterized as “rage bait.” Even though liberals would flock to the page to leave irate comments, they were still clicking. “It’s a win-win situation, because you’re getting engagement anyway, and your content will go viral,” he says.

Writing a book that goes over 100 years made this clear to me: often these individuals prosper when there's a sense of a transition needed in politics; that the old ways—the old parties—need to be rejuvenated; there's a lot of disaffection with politics. And they come, and a lot of them have a background in either entertainment, TV (like Berlusconi or Trump, Mussolini was a journalist, Mobutu was a journalist), they are lethally charming, they are superb communicators—Trump is one of the most skilled propagandists in history, he really is—and they have charisma, and so they galvanize the public and the political marketplace. They see a void, and they put themselves in there. And because they have no morals and they're transactional, they can be whatever the moment needs them to be. This is very important. They cater themselves to the perceived will and hunger for certain personalities and so often it's when there's been a lot of political progress for social justice: it could be worker's rights, it could be gender equality, it could be racial equality—that is when some people think they're losing out—which is very important for Trumpism. And so the Strongman comes up and says, ‘oh, no more of that, we're going to turn the clock back.’ And so we've seen this with the misogyny, the racism, the concrete evisceration of DEI policies, and so they've reshaped the nation to fit those anxieties that some people had and in the American context that's for white male supremacy. It happens over and over in history, these transitions, when these individuals have success.

‘I can hardly remember the past. Only a few things stand out.’ ‘I don't believe you.’ Geraldine thought that Jane liked to protect herself, pretending to be invulnerable. ‘When you're having those experiences,’ Jane said, ‘you think it'll all matter so much later on, when you're older. You imagine yourself reading old letters, looking at photographs, reminiscing with wistful tears, that sort of thing. But the truth is that you leave most of it behind you. The present is paramount. It's always everything.’ ‘Isn't there some tragic kind of brain damage where you can only live in the present moment?’ ‘Obviously I don't mean that. But those old stories diminish and don't matter anymore. It's shocking, really. We believe we can keep everything and make it all add up.’ Geraldine considered this carefully. ‘Some of the stories matter to me.’ ‘You have too much time to think. You need distraction.’ ‘Things from the past, which I thought were tidied away, swell into new significance in old age.’ ‘You talk as if we're ancient. We're not that far gone yet.’ ‘I see things in their right proportions, now that they're so far in the past. They've become grand and moving. Mythic.’

Time passed slowly, though, never once reversing course. One minute took one minute, one hour took exactly one hour. Time passes ever so slowly, yet it doesn’t rewind. That’s the lesson that period of life taught me. Obvious, of course, but sometimes it’s the obvious things that have the most significance.

Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.

The seed and soil for fascism is in the hearts of every person. Echoes of bygone sorrows are the sole barrier that prevent the wary from nurturing it.

Because you see these low-level foreign workers working two or three jobs, twelves, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, longing for home (a waiter shows me exactly how he likes to hold his two-year-old, or did like to hold her, last time he was home, eight months ago), and think: Couldn’t you Haves cut loose with just a little more? But ask the workers, in your intrusive Western way, about their Possible Feelings of Oppression, and they model a level of stoic noble determination that makes the Ayn Rand in you think, Good, good for you, sir, best of luck in your professional endeavors!

A young friend who writes content for the news paper of an online media giant, emails me: “I just wrote the news headline for my job: ‘Anna Nicole’s Lost Diary: “I Hate Sex.” If anyone wonders why Americans aren’t informed with real news it’s because of sell-out corporate goons like me who will do anything to never deliver a pizza again.”

In surrendering our mass storytelling function to entities whose first priority is profit, we make a dangerous concession: “Tell us,” we say in effect, “as much truth as you can, while still making money.” This is not the same thing as asking: “Tell us the truth.” A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know, via high-tech sources, it’s clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It’s strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable and ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner.

The basic illness in our media is not cured; it’s only that our fear has subsided somewhat. When the next attack comes, the subsequent swing to the Stalinesque will be even more extreme, having, as it will, the additional oomph of retrospective repentance of what will then be perceived as a period (i.e. now) of relapse to softness and terror-encouraging open discourse.