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This week on “The Argument” podcast, Jerusalem and I talked about A.I. risk and the possibility of superintelligence. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad-free and read the transcript at the end of this post. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Concerns about catastrophic risk from A.I. are often dismissed as “science fiction” for the very good reason that such scenarios do, in fact, feature heavily in the history of science fiction.

The history of ideas is interesting and important, though. The question of A.I. risk is one that has been considered repeatedly by a large number of people over the past 150 years, including by many who are not science-fiction authors.

Of course, the fact that things occur in works of fiction is not evidence that they will occur in real life. But thinking and talking about fiction can clarify what we’re actually disagreeing about.

In smart cases against A.I. safety worries, like this recent one from Claire Lehmann, a lot of the words are wasted on questions that are not at all the crux of the issue.

Lehmann and Steven Pinker (someone else I agree with on most issues but not this one) are simply skeptical that superintelligence is possible. But this is the difference between not believing that humanity will ever be able to build spaceships with warp drives and not believing that a warp-capable human civilization would construct a large-scale United Federation of Planets. It’s one thing to debate whether something is or is not technically possible; it’s another to consider what impact it would have if it did occur.

I have no idea whether Pinker or Dario Amodei is correct about the possibility of superintelligence — they both know a lot more about cognitive science than I do — but I do believe that thinking about the history of fictional treatments of existential risk helps clarify what it is we are arguing about.

Superintelligent A.I. is hard to control

The oldest treatment of this I’m familiar with is from Samuel Butler’s 1872 book “Erewhon,” a somewhat satirical description of a society that has, among other things, essentially banned machines. They did so when Erewhonians realized that machines could undergo the same Darwinian process as animals, becoming more and more advanced over time until eventually — due to the shorter generation cycle — they would overtake humanity and displace us. The Butlerian Jihad in Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in which humanity gets rid of all computers, is an homage to “Erewhon.”

In her final novel, 1879’s “Impressions of Theophrastus Such,” George Eliot takes Butler’s Darwinian argument seriously.

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If you’d rather stay on Substack, head to “The A.I. Apocalypse Canon and Why It Matters” to watch or listen to the episode, read the transcript, and join the discussion.

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Soon after the 2024 election, I published an article titled “How Donald Trump Could Succeed: Or, More Likely, Fail.”

I think that clearly, as of late September 2026, he is failing.

The once-vaunted “vibe shift” has evaporated and young voters have swung back to the left. We have a House incumbent in a Trump +15 district distancing herself from Trump’s immigration policy. The big question of the midterms is whether Democrats can win Senate races in Iowa, Texas, Alaska, and Kansas — states that should not be in play.

This doesn’t mean that MAGA is down for the count, by any means. The Republicans have a daunting cash advantage and the Senate math is objectively very difficult for Dems.

But Trump is undeniably unpopular. And in terms of the scale of his failure, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that Republicans’ best electoral news is just that while Democrats have good nominees in a number of well-chosen races, the national party leadership has not moved to the center since 2024 and a lot of blue state progressives are being replaced by even-further-left politicians.

That’s keeping Republicans in the game, to an extent. But it also underscores the reality that Trump is doing the opposite of crushing and discrediting the left — he’s rocket fuel for thermostatic counter-mobilization, just like he was back in the “Woke 1” days.

So if Trump has failed, how does my own diagnosis hold up?

I think the answer is that it’s pretty good, but not perfect.

My most successful, most fundamental forecast, one that I think a lot of tech industry people might have benefited from listening to, was that Trump was more likely to fail than succeed. Something about the Silicon Valley fast-follower mindset seems to make these guys struggle to understand the basic nature of the political pendulum, and a lot of folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who used to have more progressive personas bought high on MAGA right after Trump won, when they should have hedged their bets.

Presidents usually overreach, and Trump is certainly not a person of above-average discipline or judgment.

Bad luck or bad policy?

One thing I noted in the piece was that despite Trump’s anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail, the national security team he announced shortly after the election was “an extremely hawkish group that screams ‘hot war with Iran.’”

In retrospect, I wish I’d made a bigger deal about this.

I noted at the time that it seemed like a team that would lead the country into war with Iran and then hedged with the observation that presidents sometimes surprise us. So far so good! What I didn’t do in the piece was dwell on the idea at any length, which is too bad because I was right about the team of super-hawks and this seems to have kind of wrecked Trump’s presidency.

I mentioned this back in April, but there’s a weird finding in the economics literature that Democratic Party presidents enjoy systematically better economic performance even though they don’t pursue systematically better economic policy.

The explanation, according to Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, is that “the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total-factor-productivity (T.F.P.) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.”

They seem to primarily understand this as a question of good luck. But having watched both the George W. Bush and second Trump presidencies unfold, I think it’s because Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness. Trump made a great show of breaking with the Bush-era “neocons” over their idealistic invocations of democracy-promotion. But the actual problem with Bush-era foreign policy wasn’t belief in democracy; it was excessive belief in the potential upside of coercive military force. Trump has retained the error while reconfiguring the goals.

Overreaching on immigration

In the piece, I also argued that “nothing did more to drive support for Trump than backlash to the multi-year span of chaos at the southern border due to widespread exploitation of asylum loopholes,” which gave Trump a huge opportunity to reap a political win by forcefully doing what voters wanted and shutting down the irregular inflow of unselected immigrants.

He did that, and I think it’s worked well for him.

I also said he’d be tempted to try to actually deliver on the promise of “mass deportation” from the interior and that this would probably generate backlash.

My view was that the most prudent course would be to return to the Obama administration’s first-term policy of rapid-fire jailhouse pickups of illegal immigrants arrested for non-immigration crimes in cooperative jurisdictions and to try and avoid picking other fights. Trump has done plenty of that style of immigration enforcement, but he’s also done a lot of more aggressive interior-enforcement actions of the sort that I thought would spark mass public backlash.

They kind of have, but my read of the evidence is that it’s much less backlash than I would have hoped and much less than a lot of progressives seem to believe has actually occurred — Trump’s immigration approval rating has drifted down, but it’s significantly higher than his overall approval rating or approval on any other major issue.

Or to put it another way, the really clear backlash has been to extreme forms of overreach — such as immigration officials literally killing American citizens without cause and the White House covering for them.

That’s incredibly bleak and it did generate, eventually, some pullback from the administration. But they’ve really gone quite far on immigration issues. Interior enforcement has been consistently aggressive, they are stripping as many people as possible of legal status, they’ve deported a considerable number of people erroneously, they’re messing up skilled legal immigration — and I think it’s hard to argue that they’re paying a big price.

This dynamic is bad for Trump in a handful of South Florida and South Texas districts that are heavily Latino but swung heavily to the right in the 2020 and 2024 cycles, so it’s not like there’s zero backlash.

But still, immigration is consistently one of Trump’s best-performing issues, so he’s kind of incentivized to do cruel, flashy things to drive attention to it and away from the core affordability questions that are crushing him.

Moving backward on affordability

I noted in the piece that the most obvious way Trump could fail would be by trying to actually implement his campaign promises on tariffs, since they directly contradicted the mass public’s urgent desire for cheaper stuff.

“Trump’s supporters in the business community say that he’s just lying and won’t do this,” I wrote, “that he’ll use the threat of tariffs to coerce certain policy concessions out of certain foreign countries.”

I thought threatening tariffs and then calling off trade wars in exchange for minor, superficial, or even totally fake concessions was a pretty good idea given how much Trump himself dominates the MAGA information space. The risk to his presidency was that he’d really do it.

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Trump very early in his administration did the huge Liberation Day tariffs, faced massive market and political blowback, and backed down. But ever since backing down, he’s been trying to recreate Liberation Day in the aggregate while minimizing stock market blowback. In terms of the problem Trump is trying to solve, this has worked. Notably, the data center industry has gotten exemptions so that the construction boom is going on unabated.

But this does not help people with the cost of living.

In fact, the furious pace of A.I.-related investment is raising the price of consumer electronics that compete for the same stuff.

Meanwhile, the tariffs as such are not having that large an impact on the overall cost of living. But in political terms, they’re a salient and obvious example of a president who was elected on a promise of lower prices acting to make prices higher.

I said in the piece that it was “basically inconceivable” that Trump would avoid the kind of deficit-financed regressive tax cut that added inflationary pressure to the economy and pushed up interest rates and, indeed, that’s exactly what Trump did. So we have not only the war spiking energy prices but also Trump’s two most high-profile economic initiatives — the One Big Beautiful Bill and the tariffs — both pushing up the cost of living.

It’s honestly incredibly stupid to win an election on the basis of making an impossible promise of lower consumer prices and then to take deliberate policy actions that go in the other direction. But here we are.

A cautionary tale, not a model

I don’t want to claim oracular wisdom on any of this, but I do think the general tenor of my forecast — that Trump would probably overreach across a broad range of issues and spark significant backlash — was basically borne out and a lot closer to the mark than once-widespread speculations about a vibe shift or a realignment.

The immigration backlash point proved, I think, to be further away than I thought it was, which still didn’t stop Trump from going too far.

The immigration case is a particularly pointed illustration of why I find it disturbing that so many progressive policy entrepreneurs continue to cast Trump’s approach as a model to emulate rather than as a cautionary tale.

I do understand the appeal of heavily relying on legal creativity and aggressive assertions of executive power as the main mode of policymaking. The alternative is to focus on winning supermajorities, which requires a more moderate big-tent approach or else relying on bipartisan legislation as the main mode of policy change.

But even on immigration, where Trump had the public squarely on his side and he acted with maximum aggression and got away with more than I thought he would in terms of public opinion, he hasn’t actually enacted any permanent legislative change. I’ve seen conservatives on social media jumping up and down with delight about Trump enacting a new “public charge” regulation for visa issuance that reverses the Biden administration’s reversal of conservatives’ prior effort to enact this regulation in Trump’s first term.

This kind of see-sawing is inherently less impactful than a push to change actual immigration law would be. But to change the statutes governing who gets visas and the terms by which foreign-born people or residents of mixed-status families can access the social safety net would require Republicans to set priorities and to give Democrats some wins on topics that Republicans have decided are lower priority.

By insisting on purism, you find yourself limited to executive actions and you actually achieve less.

And it seems to me that as progressive schemers plot their agenda for 2029, they are basically aiming to recapitulate these mistakes. The reason Trump didn’t genuinely focus on reducing the macroeconomic drivers of high prices and high interest rates is that doing so would have required sidelining his pre-baked ideas around taxes. Democrats, similarly, will face a choice between doing internal coalition management by rebranding a progressive-interest-group agenda as “affordability” and actually focusing on affordability. And then on the broad suite of other agenda items, they will face the same tradeoff between purity-maxxing through executive action and the annoying — but ultimately more impactful — process of securing durable base hits through bipartisan legislation.

If you want to reshape the country in more profound ways than that, you need some combination of winning huge congressional majorities and/or being popular enough to survive midterm backlash cycles, either of which requires being way more prudent and disciplined than Trump was rather than plowing ahead like a bull in a china shop.

If you want to find a Republican model to emulate, I would forget Trump and look at New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, who is cruising to re-election in a state Kamala Harris won despite a terrible national political climate.

Notably, she pulled this off without being a Phil Scott type who’s checked by a Democratic supermajority in the legislature. There’s a red trifecta in New Hampshire, and they have chosen to behave in a disciplined way — they refused to do a MAGA gerrymander of the House map, for example, to avoid nationalizing state politics — and have made incremental policy gains and built power.

I often hear that it’s impossible for political coalitions to be disciplined in the social media era, but while I agree that it’s hard, I think this is learned helplessness. They’re disciplined in New Hampshire. Trump and the Republicans have been very disciplined about abortion, while they’ve chosen to be reckless in other areas and are paying the price.

Democrats shouldn’t try to harness that same recklessness to progressive ends; they should learn to behave more prudently.

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I disagree with Nikole Hannah-Jones about a lot of issues, but I thought her recent piece about her regrets over sending her daughter to her poor-performing local public school rather than acting like most parents and deploying her financial means to maximize school quality was extremely well-written, emotionally affecting, and honest.

I’m also a little sad to say that among acquaintances of mine, especially non-parents, the main takeaway from the story seems to be that the threads of idealism were completely misguided and every parent has an absolute obligation to do everything in their power to optimize for their own kid.

Reading the story, I had some uncomfortable moments because Kate and I have made structurally similar choices with our son’s education. From pre-K (which starts at age three in D.C.) through fifth grade, he went to our local public elementary school, a Title I school that is 47 percent Black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 22 percent English language learners; it was even less white when he started.

He now goes to our locally zoned middle school, which has similar demographics.

Since he’s only been at the middle school for a few weeks, I can’t speak to the experience in detail. But our experience being the affluent family at a mostly low-income majority-minority elementary school was fine — good, even. Not without difficulty or downside, of course, but even from a purely selfish viewpoint, I’d say the difficulties and downsides were minor compared with the price of private school tuition or the annoyance of moving to the suburbs.

What’s more, not only do I think it’s been a fine decision on a selfish family level, I think that it has accomplished some of our broader goals. The school primarily serves low-income families and many of the kids do have difficult home lives and discipline problems at school. But the school was still a well-run, happy place for our child, who learned to navigate a much broader range of social interactions than if we’d sent him to school only with other affluent children, and the presence of a critical mass of affluent, educated, engaged parents I think made a real difference in the lives of the teachers and the students.

I’m not here to quibble with Hannah-Jones’s take on her experience, and our situations are certainly not identical.

Instead, I’m writing to those who reacted to her piece with blanket skepticism about inner-city schools or with hostility to the idea of considering the needs of other children when deciding what to do for your own, because it would be a shame if every affluent urban parent of a toddler decides they need to flee to the suburbs.

Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. But the actual details of schools that serve high-need populations vary quite a lot, and it’s worth both engaging with the specifics of your local situation and thinking about the general policy questions.

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Housing this week is a tale of contradictions. Buyers have more leverage than they have had in more than a decade, but they aren’t feeling it. New York City’s socialist mayor is w…

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Polls indicate that Democrats are in line for a very good midterm. They’re heavy favorites to win the House, poised to do well in gubernatorial races, and stand a good chance of flipping the Senate despite unfavorable geography (unless John Fetterman flips it back).

But is this right, or are the polls just massively oversampling Democrats? One way to check is to look at the prediction markets, which are maybe a little less bullish on Democrats’ fortunes than Nate Silver’s model but still say that Democrats are more likely to win a Senate seat in Texas or Alaska than Republicans are to win in Michigan.

The markets, in short, think the polls are basically right.

As a journalist, I do really like having prediction markets for this sort of gut check, although this appreciation exists awkwardly alongside my concerns about the social impact of widespread legalized sports gambling. (And to that end, perhaps I should clarify now that this post is most certainly not sponsored by anyone.)

But one reason I find it useful is that opinion writers are constantly trying to position ourselves relative to the conventional wisdom or what “people” think. But even with polling, it’s traditionally been hard to know what the conventional wisdom is. It’s useful to have a line on a chart that says very clearly there was a Marco Rubio boomlet earlier in the year but everyone is back to thinking the 2028 G.O.P. presidential nominee will be JD Vance.

Beyond acting as a sort of conventional wisdom index, though, the more interesting question is whether these markets provide additional insight into the underlying truth.

After all, a big problem with journalism is that while conveying accurate information is a big part of what journalism is for, the actual incentives for correctness and truth-telling are weak. One reason a lot of the best, most sober-minded reporting comes in business sections and in places like Bloomberg and the Financial Times is that’s where the value proposition of journalism comes closest to “the customer needs the information to be accurate.”

Similarly, when you’re betting, you want to be correct. The gamblers may be wrong (indeed, obviously a bunch of them are going to be wrong) but they’re at least on average genuinely trying to be correct. And not only could a truth engine be useful, but (per the point about the business press) to the extent that world affairs becomes an investable proposition, that creates a market for accurate information.

At the same time, these things are not oracular. Right before polls closed in Wisconsin, the gamblers had Francesca Hong not just as a favorite (as the polls said) but as an overwhelming favorite. There was no hint in the market data of what was to come.

Still, this is unfair in isolation. Things that a forecaster says have 97 percent odds of happening shouldn’t happen 100 percent of the time. They should happen 97 percent of the time. The right question is about calibration: Do things happen roughly as often as the markets say they should happen?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is “basically yes.” But at least with regard to American election outcomes this turns out to be hard to distinguish from “assuming the polls are correct is a good betting strategy.” We all know polling isn’t perfect, but markets seem to confirm that it’s decent.

What they don’t seem to do is give us a lot of extra information.

The primary-election markets were pretty well calibrated

Kalshi released its own study in August looking across all its markets and concluded that Kalshi markets are extremely well calibrated.

Of course, I don’t take Kalshi’s word for it. And beyond their calibration, I’m also interested in the question of whether these betting markets told us anything useful about elections. Kalshi and Polymarket both make their data available via A.P.I., and thanks to the miracle of modern artificial intelligence, even I am now capable of generating the code needed to pull it all and get the data for the primary-election markets.

When aggregating across both Kalshi and Polymarket and looking at every primary for which there was a market, you can see that the calibration is in fact pretty good. The main exception, predictable from our general knowledge of human psychology, is a small bias toward long shots.

But generally speaking, when the predictors bet that a candidate has a 75 percent chance of winning, that candidate wins about 75 percent of the time.

That’s not nothing. Indeed, this is precisely the nuance that written commentary often misses. Seventy-five percent is not a coin toss. It’s not neck-and-neck. If you think Hillary Clinton has a 75 percent chance of winning, it makes sense to focus most of your planning on preparing to cover a Hillary Clinton transition. But then if Donald Trump wins, that doesn’t mean you were “wrong” per se — the coin should come up heads twice in a row one time in any four. So this is decent performance.

Still, we’re left with the question of whether this really teaches us anything.

Philip Tetlock is one of the great prophets of prediction markets, and one of his core findings in both “Expert Political Judgment” and “Superforecasting” is that subject-matter experts tend to be surprisingly bad at predicting things within their area of expertise.

The people who are best at predictions, the superforecasters, tend to have a domain-agnostic skill.

It’s not a superpower. It’s a discipline they deliberately hone over time — making precise, quantified predictions and then looking back at their calibration and trying to improve. The promise of a prediction market in sports isn’t just that it can tell you the Spurs will do better than the Wizards (everyone knows that) but that it can harness forecasting skill to deliver better results than blowhard sports pundits.

For elections, fortunately, we don’t need to rely only on blowhard pundits. We have public opinion surveys — polls — that tell us who’s going to win the election.

Prediction markets mostly follow the polls

This is where it seems to me the markets are taking the L.

Predicting elections when you have access to good polling data just isn’t that hard. The candidate who’s up is usually going to win. If there’s a small polling lead, you should give the leader a small edge in the odds. If there’s a big polling lead, you should be very confident. It’s true this will occasionally lead you astray (like in Wisconsin), but there’s no great shame in that — it’s about calibration.

The problem is that it’s hard to find examples of the betting markets doing much more than processing the polling data as it comes in. What you get instead is a lot of cases of markets shifting strongly after surprising new poll results and then being vindicated.

But take a case like the Republican primary for Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District.

I didn’t think much about this race until it happened. It didn’t attract much coverage, and I didn’t see any public polling about it. Trump endorsed a guy named Amir Hassan, and the markets assumed Hassan would win, but he ended up losing to Thomas J. Smith, whose name was on the ballot even though he’d dropped out.

“The guy endorsed by Trump will defeat the guy who already dropped out” was a perfectly reasonable assumption. Given that it turned out the other way, though, it’s pretty obvious what happened — Republican primary voters like the name “Thomas Smith” a lot more than the name “Amir Hassan,” and precisely because nobody was paying attention to this race, they probably didn’t realize that Trump was backing Hassan and Smith had dropped out. The betting odds do not display any foreknowledge of this whatsoever, even though it’s also the kind of thing where you might expect a shrewd generalist could have added value.

On the other hand, there’s only $5,367 of total volume in the market.

There are a bunch more races like this — TN-4, TN-6, MO-4, MO-8 — where inconsequential primaries received minimal coverage and no public polling and where the ultimate winner was a huge underdog in thinly traded betting markets. It’s not that every unpolled race is like this, of course. In fact, most unpolled races just featured an overwhelming frontrunner (an incumbent facing a token primary challenge, say) who was heavily favored in prediction markets the whole time and then won.

Betting on politics isn’t very lucrative

The point is that it’s hard to find a marquee example of a race where the private information aggregated in the market was really onto something.

The markets are a good index of conventional wisdom, which is mostly heuristics like “the candidate up in the polls will win” or “in the absence of polling, assume the incumbent and/or the candidate Trump endorsed will win.” And what we see in the calibration is that those heuristics are pretty good!

But sometimes you get a race like the Democratic primary in CO-3 that attracted very little national interest, polling, or coverage and where there was no obvious reason to see one candidate or the other as the frontrunner. Markets narrowly favored Alex Kelloff, but actually Dwayne Romero won.

In retrospect, Romero’s victory can be seen as a data point in favor of one of my pet theories: that white candidates whose names end in vowels overperform with Hispanic voters (see James Talarico, Jim Costa, John Duarte, David Valadao for other examples). Maybe I should have seen Romero selling at 36.5 a month before the election and bought in on the basis of vowel theory.

Given what we know, though, the real way you’d expect markets to generate information about a race like this would be by getting people to commission polls. We know that betting markets mostly follow polling and that polling is mostly pretty accurate. So if you commissioned a good poll of this race, you’d probably have seen that the markets were underrating Romero and had a chance to buy. But the total trading volume on this race was tiny — $72,000 or so on Kalshi — so it doesn’t really seem like this would be a worthwhile investment.

Another potential source of information is private polling. It’s possible some of the super PACs or party committees that were polling Colorado to get information about other races in the state actually had CO-3 data. People with access to that information could trade on their private knowledge, but that violates the markets’ insider trading rules and again doesn’t seem like something that would be lucrative enough to be worth losing your job over.

And that seems to me like the limit of these markets at this point.

There’s enough publicly available information and skilled traders to make election markets well calibrated. And theoretically the markets could generate even more useful information by spurring people to invest in high-quality polling. After all, one huge problem with public polling is that if you tell a media outlet you could make their horse-race poll slightly more accurate by tripling the cost, it’s not really clear why you’d spend the money on that. A gambler seeking a private edge might, and his bets could convey new information to the public.

But the market for random House primaries isn’t like the market for global oil futures or a major stock exchange where gaining a small edge can be quite lucrative. So we’re left, for now at least, with what seems to me like an efficient processor of public information and a good index of conventional wisdom but not necessarily a source of fresh insights.

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This week, Airbnb announced its new Housing Accelerator, committing an initial $250 million in funding that it claims can unlock $5 billion in capital over 10 years, with a goal of constructing 750,000 homes that Airbnb says have cleared most regulatory hurdles but lack the fi…

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Before getting to the Mailbag, I want to say something about the increasingly salient A.I. debates happening online. Trying to think about policy involves forming views about a lot of contested questions, many of which don’t have immediately obvious answers. That means you necessarily find yourself deferring to an extent to the judgment of other people. Which means that something very important to do in life is decide how to assess which people are reliable sources of information.

The way that I think a lot of people go about doing this is kind of basic friend/enemy politics. They emotionally or intellectually anchor around some particular point and then just try to align with the people who are aligned with them on that.

And I think that’s a mistake. The fact is that for basically any widely held political view, a huge share of the people who hold the view are going to be ignorant, intellectually sloppy, or otherwise badly flawed in their reasoning. That’s just what people are like.

What you ought to do instead is try to see which people casually toss off false statements about things that are easily verifiable. One salient example this week is that I’ve seen a lot of conservative-minded people who decided to align with the White House’s regulatory skepticism on A.I. safety saying that the people who are pushing concerns about the risks of A.I. are the exact same people as “climate doomers” and anti-nuclear activists.

Anyone who is saying this either doesn’t know what they are talking about or (worse) does know what they are talking about and is choosing to lie to you.

That’s not a good person to listen to on this subject. For better or worse, the relationship between the climate movement and the effective altruist community has been very antagonistic over the years precisely because the latter group did not accept the totalizing and apocalyptic narratives the climate people were invested in.

To be maximally generous to Erickson, he was just popping off without looking into it. That’s not ideal epistemic behavior, but I think we’ve all done it (certainly I have) and it can be useful as a learning experience. But if you pop off, get told you’re wrong by better-informed people, and then plow ahead unashamedly, that’s bad. Don’t do that. Don’t listen to people who do that.

The Digital Entomologist: Will Stancil and Parker Molloy got into it on Bluesky. Molloy’s theory seems to be that Talarico showed he’s transphobic, and it acceptable to work to reduce his support which could result in Paxton winning — possibly leaving a 50/50 Senate which remains in the thrall to the Trump personality cult. Her argument seems to be that the election is the best time to try to influence a politician. It is better to defeat the one who is closer to you, than to keep the pressure on for the next 6 years. How does post election influence work? How can one convince trans activists that they are better off talking to Talarico for the next 6 years than being ignored by Paxton?

I certainly agree that vote blue no matter who reduces the influence of those whose votes can be taken for granted during the election, but I also think that those voters still have a lot of influence during the term if they in part of the coalition. Or is that incorrect?

I think the big thing that has gone weirdly missing from a lot of progressive thinking about the political system is the concept of “persuade people that you are correct.”

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Hey guys! For a while now I’ve been hosting a podcast, called “The Argument,” with Jerusalem Demsas, the editor in chief of The Argument magazine. We realized that rather than sending everyone a separate podcast email each week, it would make more sense to incorporate the Thursday podcast releases into the morning’s article.

The podcast itself has a few different episode formats, but once a month or so we do a “book club” episode where we read a classic book. This week’s was Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom.” In our conversation, Jerusalem and I really dug into Hayek’s ideas. But as someone who’s interested in history, I also wanted to write in greater depth on the specific historical argument of the book.

For an 80-year-old book written by an Austrian guy in a language he didn’t speak natively, Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom” is incredibly engaging and accessible. It’s also crackling with insights on nearly every page — I kept furiously highlighting passages that reminded me of contemporary controversies and phenomena so I’ll have quotes and points for future articles on everything from antitrust policy to Waymo to health care.

What’s remarkable is that even though the book is really good and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the future of liberalism in these fraught times, its ostensible core thesis also seems totally wrong.

Hayek wrote it in the middle of World War II, when lots of people in America and especially Britain were looking at the semi-planned wartime economy and seeing it as a model for peacetime. He thinks this is a bad idea (this part holds up) that if implemented will lead to a totalitarian regime (this part does not) and also that German retention of planning concepts from World War I during the interwar period is causally responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, which I think is so clearly wrong that I can’t help but quote from the introduction, where Hayek writes that “few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

I want to emphasize that the book is not at all a detailed survey of German politics in the 1920s and 1930s; it’s a book about economics and political theory.

And that’s why it’s a good book and why on the podcast we mostly talked about the insights we think hold up. But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.

One point I tried to make last week about 9/11 is that while Osama bin Laden was swimming in some big currents of violent Islamist political thought that have deep roots and semi-broad sociological appeal, the specific theory whereby blowing up office buildings in New York City would advance that cause was quite weird. It’s easy to imagine a world where the same basic ideological currents are in the mix but nobody ever says that and all of world history is different.

By the same token, Hitler was a fairly marginal figure on the eve of the Great Depression. It was poor short-term economic management plus the questionable short-term political calculations of the non-SPD German parties that brought the Nazis to power. It was a very big deal for world history, but not an inevitable consequence of the whole structure of German intellectual life.

The real story of Hitler’s rise is mostly a history of contingency — bad choices by specific influential politicians first wrecked the German economy and then handed power to Hitler.

Paying subscribers can find the rest of the article beneath the paywall, along with the transcript for this week’s episode of “The Argument” podcast. The embedded video below is also ad free for paid subscribers. The public version of the episode is available on YouTube here.

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New polls out this week point to Democrats with a clear advantage over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. The New York Times/Siena poll of 1,503 likely voters from September 8 to 13 found Dems wi…

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So I’ve been heartened to see Rob Sand, James Talarico, Amy Acton, and Josh Turek take a more pragmatic approach to this issue. And it’s especially heartening to see that while there is of course some blowback against these candidates, it’s mostly not being led by anyone with real clout or power.

In particular, we’re not seeing safe seat Democrats blast these politicians for their more moderate stances.

That is, in a lot of ways, the most important aspect of the politics. Democrats — including Democrats in safe blue seats who hew to activist orthodoxy on this question — are making it clear that the tent includes a diversity of opinion and that holding the same views as a large majority of the public does not make you a proto-fascist.

This will hopefully allow for some refocusing of attention on the question of who actually is supporting women’s sports and why.

For example, note that even Sophie Cunningham, who has spoken out against the participation of trans women in women’s sports, does not appreciate Enes Kanter Freedom’s efforts to troll his way onto a W.N.B.A. squad. It’s the difference between a woman who is a professional athlete giving her view about a policy question that is, currently, totally hypothetical and a person trying to gin up controversy and draw attention to himself.

An even more egregious example comes from Washington state, where conservative activists have put a trans sports initiative on the ballot that would require affirmative sex verification in order to participate in girls’ school sports. This is not the standard practice even in the many red states who’ve adopted rules on this topic, and by creating new barriers to participation, the new rule would likely generate fewer opportunities for girls to play sports.

It’s not entirely clear to me why the Washington initiative is written this way. In Rachel Cohen Booth’s reporting, the proponents just deny that it says that, but it appears that they are wrong. Advocates for the initiative did not provide Booth with any legal experts who would back up their account, and when I asked Grok (seeking a “based” analysis of the controversy), anti-woke artificial intelligence agreed with her.

It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this, but it’s clear that they weren’t thinking about the best interests of girls’ sports or female athletes.

Which in a lot of ways is the natural order of things. Promoting women’s sports is and always has been a progressive cause. Lately, this topic has been a political godsend for the right, but conservatives were never actually going to center women’s sports as a cause worth fighting for.

Destroying the village in order to save it

In most of these political arguments, progressives’ point that there are actually very few trans athletes is pretty unpersuasive. You still need a rule about who can play on which teams, and people are entitled to care about what the rule says.

But when it comes to an implementation and verification regime, the underlying rareness really is a relevant consideration.

To justify doing something that will inconvenience, embarrass, or possibly deter a huge number of girls from participating in sports, you need to be addressing a quantitatively significant issue. And this just isn’t one. Under the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s current policy of gender self-identification, there are 10 trans athletes out of 200,000+ kids playing middle school and high school sports in the state.

What’s more, by an overwhelming margin, these trans athletes are not people who’ve snuck surreptitiously onto sports teams. They came out as trans and that identity is known to parents and school officials.

If Washington state and its voters want to change current policy, that’s fine (my wishy-washy take is that stringently enforced sex segregation for middle school is probably unnecessary but that for high school it typically is). You can, though, just make a new declarative policy without subjecting everyone to a verification regime. In 99.9 percent of cases, there’s going to be zero controversy. If somebody wants to make a big deal about a specific athlete’s status, it’s not that hard to do an SRY gene test with a cheek swab, which is used as a proxy for biological sex. But in the real world, this is almost never going to come up.

I did a double take when I saw this story because I know Democrats have been in the habit of raising the prospect of universal genital inspections as a reason to oppose a chromosomal definition of sex for the purposes of sports. But obviously there’s no actual need to do that! And yet, here the authors of the Washington initiative seem to have done it.

Republicans don’t care about women’s sports

In what I think is a related development, earlier this year the Heritage Foundation put out a report blasting the whole idea of Title IX parity for male and female athletes in American schools.

I was glad they did it. Not because I agree, but because this is the actual conservative position on gender and sports!

I’m old now, so I remember back in 2003 when the Bush administration considered gutting Title IX parity but backed off under pressure. But then in 2005, with Bush’s re-election secured, they grew bolder and wrote new guidance to make it far easier for schools to say there just wasn’t interest from female students in playing sports. In 2010, the Obama administration reversed the Bush rule. This is politics! Democrats pushing an ambitious vision of social change and equality; Republicans pushing for traditionalism.

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And unlike the trans issue, the implications of basic Title IX rules are far reaching. There’s a reason the U.S. women’s ice hockey team does better in international competitions than their male counterparts and the women’s soccer team does much better than the men — America has made unusually large investments in athletic opportunities for girls and it pays off. American men do very well overall at the Olympic Games, for example, but American women do even better because most of the world is behind us in women’s sports.

Like anything else in life, it’s perfectly fair to debate this. But my point is that this is a fairly big-picture, fairly long-running debate. It has intersected recently with L.G.B.T.Q. policy in a way that landed Democrats on the wrong side of common sense and public opinion. But it’s pretty clear who stands where in the broader debate.

The endgame

This larger dynamic also helps explain why Sophie Cunningham was getting booed at games after speaking out in favor of the principle that only cisgender women should play in the W.N.B.A. The actual fanbase for most women’s sports in the United States in general, and certainly for women’s professional basketball, is quite left wing and disproportionately L.G.B.T.Q. They understand Cunningham to be doing right-wing politics, and they don’t like it.

By the same token, the family and I were at the Washington Spirit women’s soccer game last weekend and there was quite a bit of advocacy material in the section for the die-hard Spirit supporters. The video that introduces the team at the start of the game starts with a paean to the diversity of the district and depicts everyone getting to the game on the metro. It’s a very progressive fan base!

Notably, though, there are no trans women playing in the National Women’s Soccer League or the W.N.B.A. In both cases, the written rules could be construed as either barring them or not. And I think that status quo serves the business interests of these enterprises, as an explicit ban would probably antagonize a bunch of fans but an influx of players with XY chromosomes would mess up the competition. This is why Kanter Freedom’s intervention reads as obnoxious to fans of the league — he’s trying to embarrass people and make it hard for the W.N.B.A. to please all its stakeholders, not addressing an actual problem.

The thing I would urge progressives who are not sports fans to understand about high-level sports is that these are literally zero-sum competitions to which generic progressive interest in inclusivity does not apply. If there had been a trans woman in the U.S. Open draw, that would have almost certainly mechanically squeezed out a cisgender woman.

Conversely, I think it would be constructive for non-opportunistic conservatives to admit that they’ve won the argument about this.

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The Women’s Tennis Association tour does not admit trans women. The W.N.B.A., regardless of its ambiguously worded policy, is in fact not full of people self-IDing into the league. The International Olympic Committee has adopted a rule using SRY testing. The N.C.A.A. has a simple declarative policy with no specific verification process. Democrats are not objecting to any of this or promising to reverse it. People don’t like to admit they made mistakes, so don’t expect Democrats to explicitly acknowledge that it was the Obama Department of Education that put on the table the idea that there needs to be a uniform national policy here. But they really have retreated from that view and seem content to let all kinds of sports bodies adopt rules on their own accord, and the trajectory of those rules is pretty clear.

When conservatives move toward something like mandatory sex verification for middle schoolers, though, that puts the debate back in more traditionally progressive terrain.

That’s a rule that’s only going to reduce girls’ participation and burden female athletes and their families for the sake of, I guess, rooting out the occasional extremely rare case of someone with an undiagnosed difference of sex development. And the broader Title IX fight is a classic left/right political battle, where conservatives just want to shrink opportunities and funding for girls’ sports.

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Last week, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada all announced new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. From the standpoint of the likely goals of the political leaders of those countries — to express moral disapproval of something bad that is happening without doing anything too costly or provocative — this seems like a good idea.

That said, one of the luxuries you have as the foreign minister of, say, Canada is that you get to weigh in on various international controversies without anyone necessarily expecting you to solve them.

A genuine difficulty facing American policymakers is that as leaders of what is still the preeminent global power with unparalleled global reach, people expect our policy initiatives to be efficacious.

Back in October of 2025, for example, the government of Italy put out a strongly worded statement expressing “grave concern at reports emerging from El Fasher of widespread atrocities, summary executions, and deliberate acts of violence against civilians committed by the R.S.F.” This of course did not stop the Rapid Support Forces, a Sudanese paramilitary group — and in fact by the summer of 2026, there’s whole new rounds of atrocity in a different part of the country. But nobody really expects the prime minister of Italy to be able to halt a civil war in Sudan.

The United States faces higher expectations.

So thinking about these West Bank settlement sanctions and the possibility that a future Democratic administration will do something similar, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of measure is almost certainly inadequate to the scale of the problem.

The people actually doing the land theft and terrorizing Palestinian villagers are the most hardcore ideologues in Israeli society. There are some Israelis living just east of the border basically because they got a good deal on housing. But the people living in the further-flung settlements and certainly the people building new outposts aren’t there by happenstance, and they’re not going to turn around over a minor economic inconvenience.

The issue is that while mainstream Israelis are not doing this stuff, they also aren’t stopping it.

They have no real sympathy for or interest in the Palestinians as human beings, they’ve given up on a peace process or a two-state solution, they’re furious about hostile coverage of Israel in the global media and what they see as a double standard, and they just don’t care. The current Netanyahu coalition is dependent on small parties that are overtly supportive of irregular anti-Palestinian violence. The opposition coalition has pivoted toward criticism of the worst excesses of the violence, but settlement expansion continued apace under prior non-Netanyahu governments, and the legal landscape in the West Bank is inherently tilted against Palestinian civilians in a way that most Israeli politicians show no interest in dismantling.

Which is just to say that if Americans want to actually change the situation, as opposed to expressing disapproval over it, we almost certainly need to go further than targeted sanctions aimed at settlements. We need to do something that inflicts pain on nicer, more sympathetic Israelis in Tel Aviv and Haifa, something that makes them want to actually change course and meaningfully alter the situation.

Getting to yes

In American discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I often notice an elision between taking a position on an issue — there should be a two-state solution, there should be a unitary democratic state, etc. — and making policy choices that will cause that to come about.

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