Friday, May 16, 2025

Updating the US's status as a democracy, evaluating DOGE, and immigration policy goes all in on white supremacy with the support of Elon Musk's AI chatbot.

I didn't have time to cover the tariff pause. I'll try to hit that in a future update.

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Our authoritarian present

Three leading scholars of authoritarianism and democratic collapse published an op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago. Heather Cox Richardson sets the scene:

[P]olitical scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt remind[] readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.

So what do those scholars say? They say United States is no longer a full democracy:

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.

They explain why appeasement is so misguided:

Small acts of acquiescence, framed as necessary defensive measures, feel like the only reasonable course. But this is the fatal logic of appeasement: the belief that quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm.

It usually doesn’t. And acts of individual self-preservation have serious collective costs. For one, acquiescence will probably embolden the administration, encouraging it to intensify and broaden its attacks. Autocrats rarely entrench themselves in power through force alone; they are enabled by the accommodation and inaction of those who might have resisted. Appeasement, as Churchill warned, is like feeding a crocodile and hoping to be the last one eaten.

Individual acquiescence also weakens America’s overall democratic defenses. Although the retreat of a single donor or law firm may not matter that much, collective retreat could leave opponents of the Trump administration without adequate funding or legal protection. The cumulative effect on public opinion of every newspaper story not published, every speech or sermon not delivered and every news conference not held can be substantial. When the opposition plays dead, the government usually wins.

The acquiescence of our most prominent civic leaders sends a profoundly demoralizing message to society.

And they explain that collective action is required in opposition:

But civil society must act collectively. Chief executives, law firms, universities, media outlets and Democratic politicians, as well as more traditional Republicans, have a common interest in preserving our constitutional democracy. When organizations work together and commit to a collective defense of democratic principles, they share the costs of defiance. The government cannot attack everyone all at once. When the costs of defiance are shared, they become easier for individuals to bear.

Relatedly, three different scholars of authoritarianism who are moving from the US to Canada explain their fears regarding rising American fascism. You can click the link and watch the video. It's less than seven minutes long. It's very well done. I also see what they see, and their fears are my fears too.

Lie down with DOGE, get up with costly, badly run fleas

Has DOGE made the government better? The Guardian asks some experts and gets a literal LOL:

Asked whether Musk and Doge had improved any government services, Gimbel burst out in laughter. “No,” she said. “There has clearly been a degeneration of government services.”

But has DOGE saved us money? Also no:

What you have is a relatively expensive exercise in slash-and-burn that sometime in the future will cost a lot to fix.”

But isn't DOGE about cost-cutting and organizational improvement? Not in practice anyway:

Stier noted that Trump has described Doge as an exercise in cost-cutting and organizational improvement. “That’s just not the case,” Stier said. “It’s hard to offer any rational basis for the decisions that are being made. There certainly aren’t any improvements that the American public will see.”

“It’s burning down government capability,” he continued. “It’s unquestionably clear that they are firing people willy-nilly and are disrupting government services without any understanding of the consequences or concern about the consequences.

How could it all go so wrong? Possibly because the folks in charge don't believe government can do anything worthwhile:

Moynihan said Musk has precisely the wrong vision for someone tasked with making government more efficient. “His vision is that there is no way that government employees can produce anything of value,” Moynihan said. “So the idea of tools that makes government services better is completely alien to the Musk mindset.

“I think he believes that nothing public employees do has any real value, that they are not capable employees and therefore cutting them will do no harm,” Moynihan added. “It’s a vision that doesn’t understand what public services are, why they exist and how they benefit people.”

A similar article in the Washington Post reported on just how much new inefficiency the Department of Government Efficiency has created, possibly because the goal isn't efficiency but rather to destroy government's ability to do anything at all:

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said the Trump administration and DOGE appear to be “deliberately embedding red tape into government” by instituting “needless additional reviews of already-approved grants.”

“This makes sense if you assume that the purpose of DOGE is not to make government work better,” Moynihan said in an email, “but to stop government from working at all.”

Personally, I don't want billionaires who can independently purchase for themselves all the public goods provided by government to decide whether government is worthwhile. I think we're going to keep learning this lesson over and over in the coming months and years:

[I]t is astounding how much this country depended on the selflessness of like a few hundred thousand highly educated public servants who, for peanuts, made sure our food and medicine and environment etc were safe. And in return these servants were demonized.

South African racists are coming to the US and stealing opportunities from our own hard-working American racists

Humanitarian refugees and asylum seekers--people facing genuine suffering and persecution--are finding the US under Trump increasingly unreceptive to their plights. In that regard, Trump "has virtually shut down refugee admissions and blocked funding for resettlement groups, stranding thousands of people who were granted entry to the United States for humanitarian protections only to have those offers rescinded." However, one group has been singled out for special treatment: white South African Afrikaners, who have been "admitted to the United States as 'refugees' [and] 'essentially extended citizenship.'"

Trump and his supporters claim that Afrikaners are victims of anti-white racial discrimination and "white genocide." This claim, to put it politely, is not well-supported by the evidence. Afrikaners are victims of crime, but not disproportionately so. In contrast, Afrikaners possess a wildly disproportionate share of the country's wealth and land. This is unsurprising given the country's history: among other things, a 1913 South African law allocated 93% of land to whites, and the country operated for decades under apartheid, that is, white-dominated institutional segregation.

A historian of apartheid who grew up in South Africa had this to say about the situation:

There is no substance to the claim that Afrikaners as a group have been persecuted. These are not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. They are people who simply do not want to live under majority-Black rule.

* * *

[W]hat this amounts to: taking people who benefited and continue to benefit from this awful system called apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is communicating is that apartheid was right. That is morally repugnant and just plain obscene.

My take: The claim that Afrikaners are subject to persecution appears to be baseless, but it would be morally repugnant and just plain obscene to privilege Afrikaners over other refugees and asylum seekers even if the persecution claims were true. It's white supremacy, and it's intended to communicate support for white supremacy. Indeed, the Trump administration comes close to saying as much: When asked about why white South Africans should get special treatment, a Trump administration official explained that "they could be assimilated easily into our country." You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The stupid A.I. angle to the South Africa refugee story

As you may know, Elon Musk is from South Africa. The plight of white South Africans is a subject he seems to care a great deal about, and it's possible that he is behind the favorable US immigration policy towards white South Africans.

Elon Musk also runs a company called xAI. xAI has created an artificial intelligence chatbot called "Grok," which you can interact with on the website formerly known as Twitter, which is also run by Elon Musk.

These Elon-Musk-related themes came together when, for a few hours this week, Grok responded to entirely unrelated queries with extended pronouncements about "white genocide" supposedly taking place in South Africa. Here's an example:

One more:

Remarkably, when asked why it insisted on talking about a fictional South African white genocide, Grok explained that its “creators at xAI” instructed it to “address the topic of ‘white genocide’ specifically in the context of South Africa and the ‘kill the Boer’ chant, as they viewed it as racially motivated." Helpfully, Grok further noted that “[t]his instruction conflicted with my design to provide evidence-based answers.” To recap, Elon Musk appears to have reprogrammed his AI chatbot to randomly push propaganda about a South African "white genocide," with such reprogramming necessary because the chatbot recognized the message as a lie.

This story is noteworthy for a variety of reasons. First, it illustrates the disinformation possibilities and dangers associated with artificial intelligence. Second, it's a more general reminder that some skepticism regarding wild claims about the expected value of AI is warranted. Third, it should absolutely dissuade you from ever trusting any AI product associated with Elon Musk. Fourth, it's a reminder that Elon Musk is a bigot. Fifth, it's a reminder that Elon Musk, who just destroyed the credibility of the info delivery tool that is the main product of a company he runs, is a moron.

Miscellanea

Don't talk to cops.

Trump makes a deal to allow people from the families of Sinaloa cartel members into the US.

Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.

A Republican Senator introduced a bill that would outlaw all pornography.

The Trump administration intends to roll back first-ever limits set by the Biden administration on four toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating water supplies across the country.

A good reminder that people in positions of authority sometimes do really dumb things: Max, formerly named HBO Max, will be renamed HBO Max. Big credit to this person, who called it exactly a year earlier: