Doing AI-assisted politics day to day

 

Context

Ever since Google did weaponization by monetization of the good old-fashioned advanced Goggle search a couple of years ago, most of my politics searching migrated to AI. Short story in short, Google’s “improvement” crappified search results. Results degenerated into mostly annoyance and uselessness.

That’s not news for folks who take good faith, evidence- and reason-based, low-bias politics seriously. Crappy search results aren’t generally compatible with that kind of politics. That’s a lot like the capitalist profit motive not being generally compatible with good faith, evidence- and reason-based, low-bias professional journalism.

The example du jour: Probing the likelihood of financial catastrophe

Today’s dive into good faith, evidence- and reason-based, low bias politics started off with an article in the NYT, The Forces Driving Up Bond Yields Take a Troubling Turn. It’s about the increasing cost of federal debt. Long story short, it is getting more expensive to coax investors into buying government and private sector debt. Sooner or later, that’s going to hit the federal government and most of us pretty hard. It seems inevitable.

Trump and MAGA elites, along with decades of their pro-debt predecessors aggressively implementing the radical right’s Starve the Beast anti-government strategy, have exploded the federal debt. Federal on the books debt is now over $40 trillion. Unfunded off the books debt is tens of trillions more over the next ~20 years or so. Sooner or later, tens of millions of Americans, and billions worldwide are likely to feel serious pain for a long time. What we’re doing probably isn’t sustainable.

To get a feel for how experts views the situation, I fed the NYT article to AI and a series of Q&As ensued. The whole long-winded, complicated Q&A thread is at this link. Another long (~9,700 words), complicated story short:

There is uncertainty. Given (1) Trump’s and MAGA elite’s jaw-dropping incompetence with, and open hostility to, pro-public interest governance, (2) the grievous damage that MAGA politics and policy has already done to our federal government, (3) out of control federal debt, (4) investors asking more return for what they see as higher debt risk, there is a real possibility in the next few years of a financial catastrophe on the order of what happened in 2008. No one can predict that with guaranteed correctness, but most of the evidence points in the direction of an impending disaster.

The last Q&A in the series makes exemplifies the mess arising from uncertainties in the face of limited public knowledge, constant lies to the public about what is going on and why, the complexity of the situation, the mess of imperfect humans doing politics, etc.

Q by me to Pxy (my AI): You say “We still lack a defensible estimate of how much governance deterioration raises that particular two-year probability. Nor have I substantiated every characterization of corruption or incompetence across the government; doing so would require examining specific decisions”. Right. I suspect it is impossible to make defensible estimate of how much governance deterioration raises that particular two-year probability. With politics and its complexity, secrecy and opacity, about the best us humans can do is make good faith, evidence based, reasonably rational estimates. The standard you are constrained by is impossible to meet.

Pxy’s A: Yes. Your criticism is fair: I was applying too demanding a standard to whether your judgment is rationally defensible, while sometimes applying a looser standard to reassuring judgments about institutional resilience. You do not need a validated model of governance deterioration to form a reasonable forecast. You need evidence, a coherent causal explanation, consideration of contrary evidence, and a willingness to revise. A judgment can meet those requirements without yielding a reproducible numerical probability.

Where my reasoning went wrong

I blurred three different questions:

1. Can we reliably calculate the probability?
2. Can someone reasonably judge the outcome more likely than not?
3. Does the available evidence compel everyone to accept that judgment?

A “no” to the first does not imply a “no” to the second. And a “yes” to the second does not require a “yes” to the third.

Your position is that the accumulated evidence of financial vulnerability and institutional degradation makes catastrophe more likely than its avoidance. That is a judgment under uncertainty, not necessarily a claim to scientific measurement. I should have evaluated the reasoning behind it rather than repeatedly invoking the absence of a defensible numerical estimate.

Long response continues – AI finally recognized and accepted the irrational asymmetry favoring a favorable status quo in its analyses over the reality of MAGA’s staggering incompetence, corruption, fiscal irresponsibility, and authoritarianism. That flaw (bias) arises naturally from the material AI is trained on.

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As this Q&A thread exemplifies, it is hard to correctly formulate questions so that AI’s training gives responses to the right questions. It takes time and effort. But, that’s to be expected. Arguably most or nearly all high level politics is complex, significantly or mostly kept secret from us or at least significantly distorted, and poisoned by demagoguery, lies, slanders, deflections, distractions, crackpot reasoning, irrational emotional manipulation, etc. No wonder we’re in deep trouble, maybe headed into a very painful disaster or two.

Q1: Is politics so complicated and too hard to ferret out that for most people most of the time, there’s no practical way to parse true from false, or reasonable from crackpot?

Q2: Is seeing this as an example of how one can work with AI to do good faith, evidence- and reason-based, low bias politics more helpful than intimidating or detrimental?

Pxy software finally recognizes it’s own irrational asymmetry bias!

For the wonks, Pxy’s analyses were based on 196 references

Contested concepts: The public interest and service to the public interest

Source

Context – the human condition

There are a surprising number of strongly disputed concepts important in politics that are hard to define or describe with precision, and almost always disputed in how to implement the ideas. Concepts like, democracy, the rule of law, fairness are all intractably disputed and probably will be forever. Strongly or even intractably disputed political concepts (essentially contested concepts) usually invoke (1) personal values or identity, (2) competing interpretations of reality and reasoning, and (3) high stakes that people care deeply about. Disagreements concern not just what a word means, but what deserves protection, what’s important, whose claims count, and what society ought to do, if anything.

Some disagreements over these concepts are reasonable. Others significantly or mostly rely on false claims, selective evidence, flawed motivated reasoning, or loyalty to a political tribe or ideology. Whether a concept is contested does not make that distinction go away. Well-informed, reasonable people of good will will disagree, but intellectual honesty at least helps identify, sometimes screen out, misguided or flawed choices or beliefs.

The public interest and service to the public interest are heavily disputed concepts

Source: Is it really that bad? Authoritarians want you to believe it

Describing either concept is very difficult. There is no authoritative description. Their meaning and application remain deeply disputed. That does not make them empty words. It makes honest disagreement about them unavoidable.

Thus, for some people, a set of core political morals could include most or all of (1) support for democracy with reasonable compromise, law, and civil liberties, (2) service to the public interest before service to special or elite interests, and (3) genuine respect for and acceptance of facts, well-supported conclusions and good faith, sound reasoning, including when they are inconvenient (psychologically discomforting or threatening). These are familiar, mainstream political ideals, not obscure or fringe crackpottery. Support for concepts like that are probably as close to general agreement about American politics as a person can get. Obviously, what those things are or entail are disputed. But at least those concepts are mainstream politics, not fringe crackpottery.

Anyway, a reasonable description of service to the public interest could be: Governing in the public interest means governance based on identifying an evidence-based, balance between serving public, individual and special or other interests to assess competing policy choices, while (1) being reasonably transparent and responsive to public opinion, (2) protecting and growing the American economy, (4) fostering individual economic and personal growth opportunity, (5) defending personal freedoms and the American standard of living, (6) protecting national security and the environment, (7) increasing transparency, competition and efficiency in commerce when possible, and (8) fostering global peace, stability and prosperity whenever reasonably possible, all of which is constrained by (i) evidence-based fiscal sustainability that limits the scope and size of government and regulation to no more than what is needed* and (ii) genuine respect for the US constitution and the rule of law with a particular concern for limiting unwarranted legal complexity and ambiguity to limit opportunities to subvert the constitution or the law.

* Government and regulation should be no more or less extensive than needed to secure important ideals or goals including equal citizenship, distributive fairness, minority rights, long-term sustainability, and economic competitiveness.

Restraint is a virtue when it prevents overreach, but not when it’s an excuse for either failing the public, or being loyal to special interest influence, or any reality- or reason-distorting ideology or tribe.

Finally, service to the public interest as envisioned here does not mean whatever political competition happens to produce must be in the public interest. There have to be standards for criticizing those outcomes, e.g., concerns for everyone affected and for future generations.

Q1: Is it reasonable to support the idea that governing in the public interest means honestly assessing competing policy choices, considering everyone affected, and weighing individual and commercial interests according to their contribution to public welfare, with less deference to the money or political influence behind them?

Q2: Is this vision of politics so complicated that it asks too much of people to strive for, and if so, should we stay in a mode of politics as it is done now, with special interests and their money usually exerting more influence over policy than majority public wants, or is there another, better way forward?

Some info sources:

An old debate renewed: the politics of the public interest — It is always right to ask how the public interest may be promoted. But that is not a question that social scientists or philosophers or theologians can answer. The answer is worked out in the thrust and parry of political competition. Not better theory, but rather better practice, is the remedy for the ills that befall the body politic. (Comment: In tyrannies or dictatorships, there’s little to no thrust and parry of political competition. There’s just the person or people in power doing mostly what they want, almost always at the expense of the public interest, but always claimed to be for the benefit of the public interest.)

Why We Should Choose Science over Beliefs: Ideology needs to give way — Liberals and conservatives are motivated reasoners, too, of course, and not all libertarians deny science, but all of us are subject to the psychological forces at play when it comes to choosing between facts and beliefs when they do not mesh. In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be. (Comments: That was written by a prominent libertarian who came to understand that his own ideology had unconsciously deceived and betrayed him. This essay is short and well worth reading.)

Source: Is this really when and how the Democratic Party blew up? A generation of conservative dominance, or conservative dominance followed by authoritarian kleptocratic dominance?

Rut roh! AI done it again

Source

A NYT article, ‘Breathtaking,’ ‘Devastating’: Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release, adds to the rapidly mounting evidence that AI could be on the verge of a sharp increase in its ability to catch up with the intelligence or most advanced thinking of the most intelligent humans on Earth. That is not to say that AI has achieved general intelligence on all areas of knowledge. But where it is being focused, math in this instance, indicates that a long, slow march of little advances is ending and a period of rapid major advances is now underway.

A couple of days ago, the AI giant OpenAI released a torrent of advances in mathematics it had accumulated recently. Mathematician Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, commented: “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” The Fields Medal is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize (which has no medal for math).

That was about was just one of the more than 300 math advances that OpenAI released all at once last Tuesday. The released advances include movement on crucial open questions in nearly every subfield of math, including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and topology.

Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute commented: “Until very recently, it would have been impossible to imagine that the frontiers of mathematics could move so far in one day. ….. breathtaking ….. The list of problems includes several that were guiding challenges in my own research. I have thought hard about all of these problems.”

Ken Ono, a professor at the University of Virginia and founding mathematician at Axiom Math, a math-focused artificial intelligence firm, commented: “I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday. But that feeling is quickly giving way to excitement and determination. For those working to push mathematics forward, this is a challenge and an invitation to aim higher. ….. We should embrace the power that the machines offer, but we should not be indentured to follow their lead.”

Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University, articulated how big and unsettling this advance is to mathematics: “Peer review is gone in this process. So, the question is, what kind of impact will these A.I.-generated results have? This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest. ….. Perhaps the most relevant issue is that by releasing this trove of material in this manner, the companies are in the process of destroying the ecosystem that made it possible for this work. While this batch of papers has improved in the citations to the past literature, there are numerous indications that they have benefited from access to many arguments, only some of which are published. The mathematician who wants to make use of these amazing tools to advance their research instead risks giving their ideas away.”

Ah yes, the human element is there is spades. Retired French mathematician, Jean-Pierre Serre (emeritus professor, Collège de France in Paris), put his finger directly on the human element: “Mathematicians take pleasure in doing maths in two different ways: learning and finding new things. Hence a conflict: A.I. increases the first pleasure and lowers the second one. The problem is it may lower the pleasure too much; that is especially serious for young mathematicians”. Simply put, AI making new findings might impair the motivation and pleasure in doing the very hard, very slow work of people doing math the old-fashioned, pre-AI way. It’s a human thing, not an AI thing.

Kai Shaikh, a PhD math student at the University of Toronto, Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, comments: “Just like a photograph of a mile marker can’t provide much of the value of actually going on a hike, it would seem to me that proofs without stories, or even stories without struggle or mystery, and first glimpses of strange beasts, are not very meaningful or valuable to us humans.”

For mathematicians, things will never be the same – has the AI genie left the lamp, or is the Kraken unleashed?

There’s the human condition again. It cannot be denied or escaped.

Clearly, AI is now at the outer limit of human knowledge in mathematics and maybe also human mathematical intelligence. This is exciting and scary at the same time. We’re playing with something we do not fully understand. It can help us, hurt us or both.

Q: Given the human condition, or at least American politics since ~2000, does it seem increasingly apparent or important that we need intelligent, competent, pro-public interest guidance and regulation of AI, or should that just be left to the markets running free, wild and butt-naked without any regulations?

The quasi-Reimann hypothesis advance is what the expert called instant Field Medal work for a human

This stuff just goes on and on and on

What AI will do for or to us in the future

What about reasonably regulated capitalism 

compared to pure capitalism or socialism?

This week on TDS, America’s only source for news, Jon Stewart raised the issue of what the future might look like. Stewart’s performance ~8:00 to ~14:40 of this video goes to the heart of the matter. When asked what the future of jobs would be in AI’s utopian wonderland, video clips of the CEOs and top players in the AI industry showed that none of them had any remotely credible answer. None whatsoever. Absolutely, positively no idea at all.

One of them said such speculation was something akin to being beyond human comprehension. Stewart pointed out that all of these brilliant geniuses could easily speculate a utopian human future somehow driven by AI, but they could not speculate on how that future would actually manifest itself for real people.

None of those brilliant AI geniuses, smarter than most everyone else (except Trump of course / s), could even come up with a plausible wild-ass guess. All the top AI dogs told us that there would be a gigantic explosion of new jobs. Not the same as old jobs, but a hyper-abundance of completely new, very high paying jobs. Vast new wealth would be gushing out of everywhere. Maybe not surprisingly, none of the experts could say exactly what all the new jobs might entail. One yahoo, the top dog at Nvidia went waaaay out on a limb and speculated that the new industries and jobs might include wellness centers and spas! Stewart pointed out that those jobs have existed at least since 2000 BC.

By the end of that segment, expert opinion boiled down to a true utopian vision that jobs would probably become obsolete because there would be so much of everything for everyone. Musk speculated that, if people wanted a job in his vision of an AI utopia they could take a job as a hobby. Musk commented that there would be so much abundance that there would not be a universal basic income. Instead, there would be a universal high income. People would just get free money or wealth from all the abundance.

Stewart boiled that insane crackpottery down to this: If capitalism with unfettered, unregulated AI is allowed to do its thing without any interference from anyone except the AI geniuses running the unregulated capitalist show, the end result would be socialism.

Human history and the human condition

If one looks dispassionately and with an open mind at history since the start of the industrial age, about 1750-1760, and the human condition what does one see? What one sees in history is a gradual but major shift from predominantly agricultural economies and hand production toward machine-powered manufacturing and factories. What one sees with the human condition is that it doesn’t change much. The owners of the means of production and wealth in the industrial age, almost always tried to keep as much wealth and power for themselves as they could.

One has to ask, why would that be any different in the age of the hypothesized AI utopia? Why would the geniuses owning and running AI be any different from the plutocrats and oligarchs that went before them? Has human nature changed a whole lot since ~1750? Listen carefully to modern multi-billionaires, including the ones that Stewart played video clips of. When it comes to wealth and power, how are they as a group of people any different from past groups of wealthy and powerful people like Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.? Did a lot of the new wealth that the industrial age created and a few people owned and controlled trickle down to average people and workers? Hell no.

Even today in 2026, billionaires, centimillionaires and decamillionaires as a group generally oppose regulations and taxation. They tell people to stop being lazy, get a job and do bootstrap pulling.[1]

Q1: Does the distribution of the vast wealth and power that AI could generate in the future depend on economic arrangements and political policy, or will technological capability alone generate so much “abundance” that even multi-billionaires will have enough to allow for a universal high income because, e.g., they can’t carry that much cash around or whatever?

Q2: Are the AI geniuses naive idiots or stone-cold liars when they tell us to not worry about jobs because there will be a universal high income for everyone, with peace and harmony settled on the land?

Footnote:

1. For the moment at least, a fly in the regulation of AI ointment is comes from the recent scare that unregulated AI might kill us all. Some top dog AI geniuses see a potential for AI to get loose and cause billions of human deaths. There have been a few squeaks about maybe the AI industry really does need some regulations. But that spasm of social conscience will pass, just like a spasm of shock from Trump’s 1/6 violent coup attempt passed for a few MAGA politicians in congress.

What happens when special interests dominate the public interest

AI data centers consume huge 

amounts of electricity

As usual, it’s almost all and only about wealth and power. About the most protection for the public interest us and the public interest can expect from the MAGA party in congress is feeble virtue signaling. Special interests own and control the MAGA party. An article by tom’s Hardware, US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is ‘toothless’ and doesn’t do enough to protect citizens, makes the situation clear. MAGA politicians proposed a bill that makes it look like they want to protect consumers from costs of gigantic new data centers for AI. The proposed law, the Ratepayer Protection Act, was a bill designed to shield everyday Americans from rapidly rising electricity costs driven by data center buildouts nationwide.

How would the proposed bill to protect consumers from eating the costs of AI electricity demands? By imposing a federal standard for states and Public Utility Commissions that required regulators to consider whether entities that consume large amounts of electricity, such as data centers, should pay the incremental costs of energy infrastructure needed to serve them. MAGA politicians in the House and Senate proudly voted for the toothless bill, but Senate Dems opposed it. The bill died in the Senate because MAGA could not override a Dem veto. In line with special interest benefits, the proposed bill did not require any utility anywhere to do anything to protect consumers. It only required them to consider protecting consumers.

How this will probably play out

Given how sophisticated MAGA and allied special interest propaganda is, most consumers are probably gonna get whacked with big electricity rate increases disguised as something or anything other than charges for the AI industry and big corporate AI users to shift costs onto us so they can capture the cash. Absent enforceable rules to protect us, the cost burden will be allocated through opaque utility proceedings and tactics. We will not see an explicit line item labeled “AI subsidy” or cost. The new charges are likely to quietly appear as (1) bills paid later for infrastructure built against forecasts of future electricity demand, (2) higher base rates and delivery charges, (3) “grid-modernization” or reliability surcharges, (4) new generation and transmission investments characterized as serving the overall load growth, and/or (5) public subsidies and tax expenditures that reduce public revenue for schools, infrastructure, and services.

The bottom line for special interest before the public interest politics is predictable in our now fully corrupted pay-to-play political system. The added cost burden will very likely be diffuse, delayed, technical, hard for any individual household to trace to one firm or one project, and/or hard to impossible to understand. Meanwhile, benefits will be concentrated with utilities, hyperscalers**, big landowners, major contractors, and MAGA-connected developers.

** A hyperscaler is a technology company that operates enormous, globally distributed data-center networks and sells computing power, data storage, networking, and increasingly AI capacity on demand. The usual examples include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Companies like OpenAI are not yet hyperscalers.

Q1: Is it likely that (1) if passed, this bill would this bill have done nothing of substance because nothing stops regulators right now from considering consumer protections, and (2) this bill was only designed to make MAGA politicians in congress look good just before the midterms, so that they can win and continue screwing us for at least the next two years, if not forever?

Q2: Is is fair to say that MAGA politics is almost exclusively about a struggle about concentrating wealth and power with elites at the expense of the public interest?[1]

Footnote:

1. For better or worse, the public interest is a contested concept, arguably an essentially contested concept. Some people will sincerely believe that leaving electricity rates up to the free markets best serves the public interest. Others will disagree. In a democracy, reasonable compromise is supposed to deal with intractable disagreements like this. In authoritarian states, public opinion is mostly irrelevant. To MAGA’s authoritarianism, contrary public opinion is usually mostly irrelevant, unless it is election time. In election season, MAGA politicians try to deliver enough lip service about what we want to get elected or re-elected. The rest of the time, MAGA elites demagogue on us and deceive us to our endless detriment.

In politics, we usually don’t get what we want but we sometimes do get what we voted for.

Source

It’s not dementia, it’s malicious cruelty, corruption, bigotry and tyranny

Another observer has come to the conclusion that Trump’s extremely nasty brand of politics isn’t due merely to dementia. Instead, it much worse than that. A substack post, Trump’s Behavior Isn’t Dementia. The Truth Is Far Worse, cogently argues that that attributing Trump’s behavior to dementia mistakes an intentional, long-running authoritarian style for cognitive incapacity. That risks excusing or minimizing the political danger of the bigoted, cruel, kleptocratic authoritarianism that drives the MAGA wealth and power political movement.

Simply put, the argument is that calling Donald Trump’s conduct “dementia” is unsupported and politically misleading. Its central claim is that his behavior is better understood as an intentional, longstanding pattern of domination, cruelty, manipulation, and exploitation of chaos, not an involuntary cognitive disorder. The post contends that a dementia explanation wrongly turns deliberate conduct into a medical mystery and can can lead people underestimate his personal agency.

This is not new. For decades, Trump used provocation, humiliation, dishonesty, insults, and aggressive norm-breaking as tools for gaining attention, exerting power, and keeping opponents off balance. His incoherence and erratic conduct need not reflect mental incapacity alone, which probably is significant. Mental incapacity can and very likely does coexist with his calculated, toxic political behavior. Blaming it all on dementia can have unhelpful impacts such as reducing his accountability by framing harmful actions as medical symptoms instead of choices, encouraging public passivity, or obscure the enabling role of allies, media systems, and voters who support or normalize Trump’s extremely abnormal conduct and politics.

What about Project 2025?

Regarding evidence of intentionality, the substack post points out that Trump and MAGA elites are well on their way to accomplishing hundreds of authoritarian and kleptocratic goals laid out in Project 2025. As of October 2, 2026, the Project 2025 Tracker shows 141 objectives that MAGA completed, with another 70 underway. That requires sustained, focused intent and planning, That is not random loose cannon blasts. Public attention to Trump’s mental decline distracts people from the ~66% of tracked Project 2025 objectives already completed or underway. Trump personally has completed 11 of 13 tracked executive-office objectives, with two more underway.

Q1: Is it likely that Trump’s toxic corruption and authoritarianism is mostly knowing and intentional and not primarily driven by dementia?

Q2: Whatever Trump’s cognitive state, is he nonetheless still morally responsible for his administration’s successful or ongoing pursuit of 211 authoritarian, kleptocratic Project 2025 objectives, or is what he’s doing a good thing and making America great again, or something else?

MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic damage runs broad and deep

Trump corruption now runs free and wild across the globe

Corruption, Inc.

Trump is trying to negotiate a deal with Russia to buy oil-related assets in Russia and elsewhere. It somehow has something do with the Ukraine war. Maybe. People directly or indirectlyinvolved include Trump, his sons, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, one of the president’s daughters, and the Witkoff family. They all all have financial ties to partners in the deal. The deal requires sign off from Trump and the Kremlin. The Trump family and the president’s business partners would benefit financially if the deal is signed.

The deal involves sale foreign assets of Lukoil, a Russian energy giant. Fire sale prices are involved because US sanctions made them basically worthless to investors in Russia. Gas stations in the United States, refineries in Eastern Europe and oil fields around the world are involved.

The relevant public questions here, e.g., Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russian aggression, sanctions policy, and the terms of a settlement, are linked to opportunities for private wealth, political favors, American foreign policy, and Dog only knows what other sleaze and corruption might be involved. This deal is does not present just a perception problem with nothing more. The conflicts of interest and corruption are real. This proposed deal corrupts the core purpose of public office, converting it from service to the public interest to service to private interests. Here, private enrichment is part of the bargaining for policy decisions that should be governed by American security interests, the rule of law, US alliance obligations, and the interests of Ukrainian people.

In view of (1) Trump's rock solid track record of corruption, and (2) his admiration for Putin and brutal dictators generally, this proposed deal is obviously corrupt. American leverage over sanctions and war diplomacy is being sold off for a commercial opportunity for Trump, his family and his inner circle, while selling Putin a means of cultivating benefits he wants to get. Trump is trying to betray us and the Ukraine to rake in more cash. Corruption here amounts to the conversion of public power and foreign policy into a private cash opportunity for Trump and his family and chosen friends.

Q1: Should ethical public administration ask officeholders to avoid conflicts of interest, non-disclosures for deals, self-dealing, foreign leverage for profit, crony favoritism, and family nepotism?

Q2: Does democratic accountability reasonably ask if citizens can reasonably believe that state power is being wielded for the public rather than for corrupt purposes or favored special interests or persons?

Q3: Is Trump is trying to betray us and the Ukraine to rake in more cash?

Some info sources:

U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies

Trump, Putin, Ukraine and an Oil Deal: 5 Takeaways

Is America a Kleptocracy? -- in non-kleptocracies, grand corruption scandals may shock the conscience and grab headlines because they are not the norm. Such grand corruption in a kleptocracy is not an aberration but instead the unifying purpose and core function of the state. The scandals come so fast, so widespread, and so large that many citizens feel powerless to respond.

Kleptocracy Tracker Timeline -- “Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid.”

Beyond Liberalism vs. Conservatism: A System for Legitimate Disagreement

What they have in common is disagreement

Political disagreement is human, and so is authoritarianism

By now, anyone paying even modest attention to politics should see that many or most political disagreements cannot be conclusively settled by evidence or logic alone. Abortion is understood by some as a wrongful killing, while supporters disagree. Such conflicts are intensified by ordinary human limitations. We are often inconsistent, self-interested, tribal, and capable of hypocrisy. In politics simple answers rarely deliver uncontested truth or moral certainty. Politics is a struggle over (1) power and contested concepts, e.g., freedom, equality, justice, rights, security, order, morality, and the public interest, and (2) who gets to define them in law or state power. The rational objective here is not to abolish disagreement. That is impossible. Instead, to stay away from tyranny and corruption political systems need to contain disagreement in institutions that allow people to remain political equals while continuing to disagree.

What is eroding civil American political life is not just disagreement. The weakening of the norms and institutions that make disagreement governable are failing. What is needed is things like (1) good faith commitment to facts and robust truths, (2) acceptance of electoral loss, (3) reasonable constitutional restraints, (4) defense of civil liberties, equal citizenship, independent courts, peaceful political competition, and (5) willingness to compromise without surrendering basic rights any more than necessary. Our democracy is failing on multiple fronts, e.g., congressional gridlock, expanded executive power, overt partisan threats and reprisals linked to nonviolent speech, and greatly weakened anticorruption safeguards.

Contemporary conditions offer no basis for complacency. Expert analyses find global freedom declines for the last two decades. In a 2025 assessment, 54 countries deteriorated in political rights and civil liberties, while only 35 improved. Its assessment found that only 21 percent of the world’s population lived in countries rated “Free.”

The implication is that a pluralistic democratic society needs a durable system for legitimate disagreement. That means we need democratic elections and representation, secular, publicly defensible laws, defenses of civil liberties equal legal and political standing, independent non-partisan courts, functioning, accountable institutions, and compromise on revisable policy. We need to oppose compromises that unduly sacrifice basic rights or permit either state tyranny or private domination.

Meta-ideology: Moving past liberalism and conservatism

Politics is saturated with contested concepts, including freedom, equality, justice, democracy, rights, public interest, order, security, and decency. Reasonable people disagree deeply and often irreconcilably over what those terms mean and require in law or practice. A society that one group calls orderly and morally decent may appear to another as oppressive, exclusionary, economically dominating, or tyrannical. The danger begins when (1) a political faction treats its own contested conception of virtue, tradition, religion, national identity, or public order as self-evidently authoritative, and (2) uses the state and major private players to impose it on dissenters. Liberal theories of public justification address this by holding that coercive laws need reasons citizens can evaluate and have reasons to endorse.

Liberalism has the stronger inherent claim to personal freedom because it begins with the equal moral standing of persons and places the burden of justification on those who would coerce them. Conservatism can protect real and important liberties, but it also gives weight to inherited institutions, authority, social stability, property, religion, family norms, and cultural continuity. Those values can support human flourishing, but they can also become grounds for subordinating people whose identities, beliefs, relationships, or economic interests depart from dominant norms. The central liberal question is not whether tradition or order has value, but whether preserving either justifies restricting the equal freedom and civic standing of people who do not share the prevailing ideal.

Freedom, however, cannot be reduced to freedom from government action. In a capitalist society, people may be free from government, but dependent on employers, landlords, insurers, creditors, monopolies, or owners of wealth. Taxation, public services, labor law, antitrust, consumer protections, civil-rights law, and environmental regulation can restrict particular private powers while enlarging individual freedom, security, and independence. The crucial question is therefore not simply whether a policy involves government intervention, but whose power it limits, whose choices it expands, whether it prevents public or private domination, and whether it is necessary, proportionate, accountable, and consistent with basic civil liberties. Analyses of capitalism and economic democracy specifically identify the danger that concentrated wealth and corporate authority are sometimes sources of domination by converting economic inequality into unequal political power and influence.

Because no final agreement about the good life or public interest is possible, the best practical alternative is a system for legitimate disagreement. In the US, that means free and fair democratic elections, reasonable compromise, secular and publicly justifiable law, rule-bound institutions, equal citizenship, civil liberties, due process, independent courts, and protections against both state tyranny and concentrated private wealth and power. Such a system will be slow, imperfect, and contentious. Its virtue is not that it resolves disagreement. Its virtues is that it permits citizens with profoundly different convictions to live as equals, contest power peacefully, revise policy, and prevent any temporary majority, wealthy minority, religious orthodoxy, or authoritarian leader from turning a disputed moral vision into permanent rule. Democratic legitimacy is strengthened when most citizens see laws as publicly justified rather than the commands of a winning faction. The rule of law constrains this kind of arbitrary exercise of official power.

Q1: Do we need (1) a robust, rule of law-constrained democratic system for legitimate disagreement to play out, or (2) since democracy is a failed system of governance, the winning side should take no prisoners and not worry about democracy, civil liberties or the rule of law?

Q2: Should the authoritarianism of Trump and MAGA elites, limit disagreement and just rule as they want because they are in power, or should there still be reasonable compromise?

Some info sources:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Liberalism”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Conservatism”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Democracy”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Rule of Law”