Social democracy vs. democratic socialism

After recent primary election results, it's hard to ignore the concept of social-something or another rampaging around in the Dem Party. 

As usual and expected, Trump and MAGA demagoguery are spewing tons of toxic mental miasma about communism in the Dem Party. MAGA's tippy-top best hyperbole and lies attacks are trying to make the liberal social-whatever sound like a horrific, imminent overwhelming catastrophe. No surprise in any of that moral rot. 

MSM reporting like this, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds favor democratic socialism, is becoming more prominent. Apparently, most of those folks have a very negative view of the American economy and capitalism generally. 

Social democracy vs. democratic socialism

Social democrats support the concept of social democracy. Modern social democracy evolved from a movement seeking a peaceful transition to actual socialism into a politics that generally accepts a regulated capitalist mixed economy with significant public welfare. These people want much better regulation of capitalism than what the GOP has been arguing for since the 1960s, and what Trump and MAGA policy have been delivering since they came into power in 2017.

By contrast, democratic socialists are real socialists. This group wants a democratically run socialist economy, including abolishment of capitalism, not just regulation of it. This group has completely given up on capitalism, and they want socialism to replace it. That's true radicalism. They want public ownership of assets used to produce services and goods to insure that they serve the public interest before serving wealthy people and entities and their special interests. 

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) elected officials or candidates are generally aligned with the DSA’s stated premise, which is that working people should run the economy and society democratically to meet human needs rather than generate profits for a few. Apparently a growing portion of Americans find that appealing (but some of us do not).

 

Policy overlaps

Policy overlap between the two groups is huge. In general, both social democrats and democratic socialists want things like (1) universal or near-universal health coverage, often by Medicare expansion, a public option, or single-payer insurance, (2) stronger labor unions by easier organizing, penalties for union busting, sectoral bargaining, wage floors, and public-sector labor rights, (3) progressive taxation, expanded refundable tax credits, Social Security and Medicare protection, paid leave, child care, and affordable higher education, (4) investment and industrial policy that protects the environment, coupled with supporting labor standards and public infrastructure, and (5) aggressive antitrust, consumer regulation, financial rules, and public provision in selected areas.

Polling indicates that most Americans mostly support those policy goals. The Democratic Party platform itself is fundamentally aligned with those policy goals. The Dem Party still does not support full social ownership of the economy. The Dem Party supports reconstructing labor bargaining power and decommodifying or subsidizing some necessities (health care, shelter, education, water, mobility) while retaining a predominantly a private-enterprise economy. 

Obviously, MAGA elites and Trump oppose all of it, despite their gaslighting propaganda telling us they support the little guy and his concerns. By now it is crystal clear that MAGA propaganda is a huge pile of . . . . .

Big stinking pile of MAGA propaganda

about working for the little guy

Policy differences

There are big differences between the two groups. Democratic socialists support major changes like (1) worker-owned or worker-governed firms, (2) public, municipal, cooperative, or social ownership in essential sectors, typically energy, transit, housing, finance, health care, and broadband, (3) public banking and democratic control over investment, (4) social housing that is permanently outside speculative private markets, (5) a greater role for democratic planning, especially in climate transition and essential goods, and (6) universal programs for wealth redistribution, and as a means of reducing people's dependency on employers and markets.

That's real socialism. Those people aren't messing around with capitalism any more. The reasons for that level of discontent are obvious. MAGA and trickle down economics mostly trickles wealth and power up to elites and allied special interests. In the process, most of get shafted and are left in a grumpy mood.

Oats are natural resources, means of production, control of money and finance, the horse is the elites and special interests, the emoji is what it looks like, and we are the sparrow

A critically important point: American democratic socialism is not the same as Soviet-style state socialism. The American theory emphasizes pluralist democracy, civil liberties, decentralized or mixed forms of social ownership, and worker/community governance. By contrast with the USSR, which substitutes state bureaucrats for private owners, keeping nearly all of the citizenry in crappy, permanently shafted conditions. MAGA demagogues routinely lie about this critical distinction.

Where or what is the Dem Party establishment in all of this?

 The Dem establishment is heterogenous, reflecting the bigger tent it lives in compared to the GOP. It is composed of mostly of wall street Democrats or business- and finance-friendly liberals, labor liberals or New Deal liberals, civil-rights and rights-based liberals, and state and local party machines.

The Dem establishment is reasonably described as conventional social liberalism. That means market-friendly capitalism with targeted benefits, anti-discrimination law, limited regulation, and incremental reform when needed. Social democracy is generally to the left of that. Democratic socialism is further left than that.

Q1: Does it feel as if the Dem Party establishment is too timid, conservative and cautious to adequately deal with the aggression and corrupt power of Trump, MAGA elites and their brand of brutal political warfare?

Q2: To what extent is the rise of American style socialism on the left the fault of Trump and MAGA party politics and policies, with their failures to deliver for the little guy -- mostly their fault, some, a little, or none at all?

Info sources: 

Social democracy

Democratic socialism

What is a democratic socialist? Inside the movement behind Mamdani’s rise

Social Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism: What’s the Difference?

Tyranny and corruption hide in agreement, disagreement reveals it

It may seem counterintuitive, but right now in the US policy agreement, including false perceptions of agreement, helps hide tyranny and corruption. Conflict reveals authoritarianism and kleptocracy. That is the heart of the message from research by Martin Gilens and Ben Page. 

Their work, and that of other researchers, helps explain why a country like the US can retain elections, produce some popular policies, and still undergo serious democratic degradation. Majorities remain highly visible, but their power to get outcomes they want against bigoted authoritarian wealth, racial hierarchy, organized politics, and authoritarian influences disappears over time. Power and wealth quietly, usually unnoticed, flows from the people to the elites in control. 

That is what is happening right now in the US under Trump, MAGA elites and their major donors and enablers. Their agenda is kleptocracy and authoritarianism, the latter being mostly a mix of dictatorship, oligarchy, white-power nationalism, and virulent Christian nationalist theocracy. Such corrupt and authoritarian politics translate into core goals of concentrating wealth and power with a few trusted, mostly above-the-law elites, and their major donors, allied corporations and special interests. Except for the theocrats, it's almost all about wealth and power for themselves, almost always at our expense. 

Digression: The theocrats? They and their divine vision of God demand culture war. It's waged largely by attacking, hating, slandering, and/or oppressing immigrants, LGBQT people, women's equality, secular law, and transparency in government. For the most part, Christian theocrat elites are a very nasty bunch of hypocrites, liars, bigots and racists.

Anyway, public majority does not exercise governing power when because it sometimes receives policies it favors. If it receives those policies because affluent citizens and/or powerful organized interests also approve, that is not majority political power in effect. In those cases, the majority benefits from elite consent. Democracy is truly tested when preferences conflict. Unfortunately, research indicates that American policy has most often been tilted toward wealth and organized power. The wealthy and organized interests have systematically disproportionate influence, especially when preferences diverge on consequential economic questions. Wealth and power flows to the top, not to the rest of us.

The relevant test is not whether ordinary people ever get what most of them want. The real test of democracy is whether the majority prevails at least equally as often when their preferences conflict with wealth and organized power. For the US, the empirical truth is no. When the elites oppose, the American majority usually loses. That is exactly and inextricably how authoritarianism and kleptocracy work. Frighteningly, that ugly truth about Trump and his MAGA elites, is mostly or completely hidden from millions of demagoguery-deceived Americans.

MAGA's big new gift to tax cheats and grifters

MAGA's new gift

A new MAGA finance rule to reduce reporting burdens on businesses is in effect. Tax cheats and criminals all over the US are cheering. A WaPo article, Treasury ends ownership reporting rules for U.S. companies, reports about reporting rules that MAGA is gutting. The rules were put in place to combat and reduce money laundering and other financial crimes. Now, tax cheats and criminals can better hide and keep more of their assets, legitimate and illegitimate.

Trump's Treasury Dept finalized the new rule yesterday. It exempts US companies and individuals from ‌reporting beneficial ownership information to the Treasury Department's financial ‌crimes unit. That obliterates reporting requirements established under a 2021 law aimed ​at combating illicit finance and tax cheating.

Not only is Trump gutting the reporting rule, he goes a big step further. Trump's treasury will delete the information previously reported by Americans. The gutted rule was simple in principle. If a person ultimately owned or controlled a corporation or LLC, federal financial-crimes investigators could identify that person through a confidential database. The information was not a public registry. This isn't a minor regulatory tweak. This is deliberate removal of a fundamental state capacity. The government's ability to determine who owns what in a state-created corporate entity is now gone. Here's FinCEN's FAQ page to bring tax cheats and criminals up to speed on the new layer of secrecy that MAGA is giving them.

The size of the burden that MAGA claims existed under the old rule does not remotely justify the scale of this new rule. For an ordinary small business, disclosure meant entering the names and identifying information of the people who actually own or control it, using a free electronic system. FinCEN estimated that a straightforward initial filing would take about 90 minutes, with more complex ownership structures taking longer. But complexity is often precisely what investigators need to untangle who owns what. An honest government concerned in good faith with efficiency and reduced paperwork could have simplified forms, extended deadlines, funded free assistance, etc. Instead, Treasury chose categorical exemption to obliterate the targeted beneficial ownership reporting. That's real deregulation of special interests at the expense of the public interest! 

How much is this gonna cost us?

This one will have some bite. The consequences cannot yet be measured precisely because Trump's administration dismantled the reporting system before it could generate years of enforcement data. The IRS projects a 2022 gross tax gap (owed but unpaid taxes) of $696 billion and a net gap of $606 billion annually. Those official figures are conservative, not a full census of sophisticated tax evasion (tax cheating). The IRS and outside analysts acknowledge major measurement difficulty involving foreign and illegal activity, complex pass-through structures, digital assets, and corporate non-filings. Research on top-income evasion indicates that conventional audits miss a lot of hidden offshore and complex-entity evasion. A cautious estimate is that eliminating ownership data could cost the Treasury ~$5 billion annually in additional uncollected taxes. That does not count undetected fraud, laundering, corruption, sanctions evasion, or other non-tax violations.

Now, tax cheats can put a business, investment account, real estate holding, or other shielded asset in the name of an LLC controlled through nominees or layered entities. The cheater can then claim that income or assets belong to a separate company, not to them. That allows things like (1) business income or capital gains to be withheld from a personal tax return, (2) concealment of property and investment income from tax authorities, (3) shifting and laundering of legal and criminal money through an entity owned by another entity, e.g., in a secrecy jurisdiction, so the human owner is difficult or impossible to identify, and (4) frustrate collection of tax debts, civil judgments, child support, or restitution by appearing to have fewer assets than the cheater/grifter actually controls.

In addition, MAGA's new secrecy shield helps people who need to hide a conflict between their official or fiduciary roles and private financial interests. A public official, contractor, executive, politically connected intermediary, or grifter can use an entity to disguise that they are on both sides of a deal. A government official can steer a contract, permit, subsidy, or asset sale to a company they secretly control. A vendor creating a hidden related-party company can send out inflated or fictitious invoices. A donor, lobbyist, or politically exposed person can conceal their financial stake in a recipient of government action. The possibilities are just about endless!

Impacts on the rule of law

This new rule is part of a broader MAGA governing strategy. MAGA's authoritarian and kleptocratic policy is to weaken or eliminate the federal government’s capacity to regulate, investigate, tax, and expose powerful but corrupt private actors. MAGA's demagoguery calls the resulting transfer of power “freedom” or “relief from burdens”, but it relieves only special interests at the expense of the public interest and average individuals. 

That policy design reveals MAGA priorities. The administration here did not just lower a compliance cost. It privileged and sanctified anonymity for domestic wealth and corporate power over the public’s interest in enforcing tax law, tracing criminal proceeds, detecting conflicts of interest, and holding the real beneficiaries of corporate activity accountable. The beneficiaries are not ordinary citizens trying to run transparent businesses. They are people and institutions for whom concealment is extremely valuable. They are precisely the people and interests that a functioning rule-of-law state should be able to easily scrutinize, not shield.

Q1: Is it credible for MAGA elites to tell us this new rule was too much of a burden on businesses to report who owns what?

Q2: Can you see why tax cheats and criminals will love using this new way of doing business?

Update: MAGA’s ongoing war to enhance global warming

Starving polar bear -- not adapting well to 

MAGA's efforts to increase global warming

The effort by Trump and MAGA elites to obliterate public concern for global warming continues. New MAGA policies continue to expand the power and unaccountability of special interests that profit from polluting. As always with Trump and MAGA policy, profits, wealth, and power are privatized and trickled up to elites and allied corporations, while the public eats the costs, absorbs the harms, while its wealth and power melts away. By now, this pro-global warming effort has caused vast damage to America’s ability to adapt to global warming. Despite constant MAGA efforts to make the issue go away, majority public opinion is still concerned about global warming. For the most part, most of the public wants the basically the opposite of what Trump and MAGA elites are doing. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA elites don’t care enough about public opinion to stop doing what they are doing.

Helping the ice melt faster

An article, ‘Truly Devastating’: Trump Ends Federal Funding for Key Arctic Climate Report, exemplifies Trump’s effort to block research. The goal is hide and downplay data showing broad and deep impacts of global warming. Here, Trump just shuts down funding for important research that policymakers would need to help them deal with the issue. But as most reasonable people know by now, informed policymakers working for the public interest is absolutely not how MAGA governs.

Here, Trump stopped federal funding for an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined and reported on the state of the Arctic. That part of the planet is warming significantly faster than other regions as continued fossil fuel extraction and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase global temperatures. For context, the last 10 years have been the 10 warmest on record for the Arctic. Trump stopping this research, which has been ongoing for over years, cripples our ability to track and assess Arctic region changes from year to year. Affected people and communities around the world are kept ignorant, as MAGA elites intend.

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

Deregulation by disempowering regulators

AP reporting in an article, Trump EPA moves to repeal landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, hits squarely on the core MAGA tactic of gutting federal regulatory agencies that often worked for the public interest. MAGA policy has been to subvert and corrupt federal agencies into entities that serve special interest wealth and power concerns. MAGA simply guts wealth and power serving the public interest and individuals. The public interest includes reasonably protecting the environment.

The proposed EPA rule rescinds a 2009 finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The “endangerment finding” is the legal basis of a slew of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. Trump’s and MAGA’s goal is to obliterate those regulations. That would allow and foster more pollution for profit for elites, with morse costs and damages socialized onto all of us.

MAGA’s cynical liar excuse is that environmental regulations were intended to regulate large sectors of the economy out of existence. Yes, regulations usually impose costs, but reasonable regulation is part of the cost of serving the public interest. We get the shaft while a few elites get our wealth and power. Trump and MAGA elites are deregulating the public interest out of existence.

Q: Based on evidence including that discussed or cited here, is Trump’s and MAGA elite’s efforts to (1) hide inconvenient environment research, and (2) get rid of environmental regulation, mostly beneficial for the public interest or for affected special interests?

Global warming, it’s partisan

Info sources:

Government Pulls Funding for the Arctic Report Card

A look at false claims made by the Trump administration as it revokes a key scientific finding

Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards

EPA Repeals Legal Basis for Regulating Greenhouse Gases. What it Means for the US — and the World

Book review: Captive Minds

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.  

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Nah, that's not for the first time. The few have always sought to rule the many. What's new is the reach, speed, and intimacy of manipulation machinery available to the elite few. 

Germaine, 2026

The May 2026 book, Captive Minds: A Study Of Manipulation, was written by two Israeli philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon. Sharon is a professor  at Tel Aviv University, and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A schizophrenic, academic read

This odd book is schizophrenic. It's boring to read too. It's too academic and often too attenuated from its core topic of mind manipulation. On the one hand its primary message truly could not be more important to politics and the human condition generally. The message is simple but subtle: To maintain democracy and fight off authoritarianism and deep corruption, citizens must be able to form and revise judgments without their reasoning processes being covertly distorted and hijacked by sophisticated mind manipulators. In short, mind manipulation is a powerful and common form of mental domination that damages cognitive freedom, which threatens democracy. 

But on the other hand, the philosophers fly off the rails by focusing on other philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. They gloss over two major aspects of the modern world and knowledge  One is the book says little to nothing about Donald Trump, Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are among the modern world's most powerful and effective mind manipulators and cognitive freedom destroyers. That omission is striking for a 2026 book arguing that authoritarian mind manipulation is a central threat to democratic freedom.

The other blind spot is that the authors barely deal directly the modern situation. Captive Minds is conceptually serious and morally critically urgent, but its delivery is far too allusive, historically cluttered. The writing is too indirect for readers seeking a persuasive, science-grounded diagnosis of authoritarian mind manipulation in present-day democracies. The authors are the wrong messengers trying but failing to deliver a critically important message. This book provides a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary but leaves the reader to do the hard and complex, but essential work of connecting it to how organized contemporary authoritarians gain and maintain power. That work is just too darned hard. Most people cannot or will not do it. Total bummer. This book is for academicians and academically-minded lay people, not a general audience.

The core messages

According to the authors, mind manipulation is not simply lying, persuasion, rhetoric, or nudging. It is influence that exploits human mental vulnerabilities such as fear, vanity, resentment, desire for belonging, bigotry, racism, or intellectual shortcuts, to gain control over how that person reaches decisions. That is as a form of domination because it can impair personal freedom without overt force, legal compulsion, or even explicit deception. It often exerts power unconsciously. Many or most people never know that they have been manipulated.  

The authors posit that manipulation is the subtler counterpart of coercion (threats or brute force). They describe authoritarian manipulation like this: "Subversive power doesn't bully or punish. It doesn't break or crush you but instead harnesses your [intellectual] powers to its own aims. ..... 'Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person's options. Instead, it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences, or adopts goals'. .... The essential point, we contend, is control over the will. ..... By viewing manipulation through the lens of power rather than truth or rationality, we highlight the centrality of control and the affinity [relationship] with coercion. ..... both coercion and manipulation are forms of domination."

You can see the academic-speak in that.

Fundamentally, mind manipulators pervert the process of judgment in other people. They influence what people think they see, whom they trust, what emotions frame an issue, and what alternatives are mentally accessible and seemingly reasonable. The authors point out that demagogues, propagandists, and conspiracy entrepreneurs create cognitive mind traps that corrode civic and rational deliberation. Public manipulation often works through agenda control and attention capture to push aside in order to crowd out truth-seeking, rational reasoning, open-mindedness and good will.

In short, the book's main weakness is its failure to translate authoritarian mind manipulation insights into a sufficiently concrete analysis of the institutions and actors now destroying democracies worldwide and precisely how they are doing it.

Teaching children defenses against the dark arts

Russian occupied Finnish territory

Context

In modern times, one of the greatest threats to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, truth, the environment, human well-being, and modern civilization is the dark arts. That includes divisive demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, bigotry, racism, crackpot reasoning (often nutty conspiracy theories), and irrational emotional manipulation to foment reason killing emotions such as unwarranted fear, anger, hate, distrust and moral outrage. Decades of radical right American demagoguery, have successfully led tens of millions of Americans to believe all kinds of lies, slanders, fake threats, crackpot conspiracy theories, etc.

Three things stand about about the dark arts in recent US history. First, it is constitutionally protected free speech. Second, the irrational deceit, distrust, divisiveness and bigotry it fomented was necessary for the rise of American MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy to gain major power and mostly keep at least since Jan. 2017. That’s when Trump was first sworn into office. Third, most of this is not new. Tyrants, thieves, liars, demagogues and mass murderers have been heavily reliant on the dark arts for millennia. Plato and Aristotle recognized the toxic power of demagoguery. What’s new now is technology that dark arts practitioners now have to bamboozle and manipulate people with their cynical lies, hate-filled bigotry, etc.

Teaching dark arts defenses to citizens

A NYT article, Finland Tries to Protect Children Against Deepfakes, With Russia in Mind, discusses current efforts in Finland to fight off the onslaught of powerful Russian dark arts attacks that are now more deadly due to the rise of AI. For years, the government in Finland has been sophisticated and dedicated about trying to protect its people against Russian propaganda attacks. Now those attacks include AI-generated content that take the Russian authoritarian’s propaganda war to a new level of sophistication and aggression.

In it’s self-defense efforts, Finland is expanding its long‑running media‑literacy work to include “AI literacy”. That includes teaching students from early grades how to recognize and evaluate AI‑generated images, audio and video so they’re less vulnerable to deceit and manipulation by AI deepfakes. Researchers and defense efforts in Finland are developing technical countermeasures such as speech/deepfake detection and source‑tracing, but detecting increasingly realistic synthetic audio and video is getting technically harder. AI in the hands of professional propagandists is learning to do better at deceiving and manipulating people.

Journalists and investigators have found nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of Finnish public figures and celebrities circulating online. That increased public concern and pressure for stronger protections. Finland’s education‑first approach builds attack resilience but that will need to be combined with better technical detection, more legal protections (especially for nonconsensual sexual content), and platform‑level measures to manage rising deepfake risks. 

In the US few or none of those measures is possible with MAGA in power. Any US effort to censor lies, or at least flag them, is immediately attacked by MAGA and MAGA-aligned demagogues and liars as socialist tyranny censoring “truth”. American social media platforms have been cowed into getting rid of meaningful content moderation, so for honest news social media tends to be cesspits of lies and other dark arts poisons. That is a major source of MAGA authoritarian and kleptocratic power.

Q1: Given the increasing power of dark arts to deceive and manipulate people, it is time to get rid of anonymity on the internet, which would go a long way to reduce dark art’s destructive, mind poisoning power?

Q2: Is Finland simply imposing socialist tyranny by censoring “truth”, as MAGA demagogues would describe it?

Info sources:

After decades of teaching media literacy, Finland equips students with skills to spot AI deepfakes — As deepfakes proliferate online, Finland adds AI literacy to its school curriculum to help children as young as 3 to recognize AI-generated fake news.

Speech deepfakes continue to challenge researchers – …. deepfake research is like playing cat and mouse. Recent years have seen significant advances in the accuracy of detection methods and countermeasures, but model generalization remains a major challenge.

Explicit Finnish celebrity deepfakes hiding in plain sight, Yle finds – Yle anonymously contacted the website’s contributing users who post images there. They replied using pseudonyms and their identities are not known. ….. The people that posted the deepfakes who spoke with Yle said that it is becoming easier to generate the images. One user admitted making nearly 200 images in a single day.

Trump's & MAGA's war on US history

Executive Order 14253

Restoring lies and insanity to US history

Just like what Putin and his predecessors did to Russian and Soviet Union history, Trump is aggressively obliterating inconvenient American history. It's just what morally degenerated, lying tyrants do. A NYT opinion by Russian journalist Masha Gessen, Trump Is Trying to Force Americans to Unlearn What We Know, covers familiar ground. She's seen and reported before on this tyrant tactic.

Gessen points out that in Soviet Union times, some folks liked to say “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” That's because Russians never knew which part of their history would be obliterated next. The same thing is happening right now in the US under Trump and MAGA politics and policy. Trump and MAGA elites are trying to make American history unpredictable. 

To kick off his rewrite of history, Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which (1) orders officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, (2) cuts funding to “programs that degrade shared American values”, and (3) reinstates some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Since Trump issued that order, the National Park Service removed signs about slavery, the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; and a scathing White House report accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.” Trump recently issued another executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”

Gessen notes that large amounts of information about Soviet terror came to light after the Soviet Unions collapsed. However, Putin forced that knowledge into oblivion. What Trump is getting rid of is the history and legacy of American slavery and racism. 

Yes, former and current political initiatives to reframe American history are heavily propelled by conservative culture warriors and key figures aligned with Christian nationalist frameworks. These groups promote hyper-nationalist narratives that deny or minimize major inconveniences like slavery while championing white civic mythology. MAGA-aligned racists and bigots are key drivers of whitewashing US history. Link

Fighting with Pxy: Within the scope of MAGA's poison politics or not?

Pxy abandoned me

Yesterday my prepaid AI Pro account with Pxy (Perplexity) stopped responding to my search and analysis queries unless I paid for more "credits", whatever those are. The same happened this morning. The new paywall seems to be real and not going away. My fully paid up account was supposed to last until Dec. Apparently too many users are costing too much for the old pricing to be honored any more. So now Pxy corp. is imposing a paywall to get more money, even if account holders do not consent to paying more. 

☹️ 

grumpy Pxy camper face

Some non-Pxy searching led to r/perplexity_ai. Lots of folks there are unhappy with what they are getting. This is one of a slew of grumpy Pxy camper posts, Bye bye perplexity.

I emailed Pxy support to ask for a refund of what is left of my account time. Their "customer service" AI called Sam said I could not get a prorated refund because I am outside the "standard refund eligibility window". Sam told me it could understand my frustration. I told non-sentient Sam to fuck off and put me in touch with a human being. We'll see how that goes in the coming days.

The current American AI business model faces a severe profitability barrier. The massive infrastructure and compute costs to run large language models are greater than the revenue generated from standard consumer subscriptions. Prices are going to have to go up a heck of a lot for profitability to be more than just a blowhard marketing mirage.

Are Trump and MAGA politics mostly to blame for this?   

Here we have a company stopping providing a service that was fully paid for, and demanding more money to continue providing what was already paid for. That seems to be awfully cheeky. It is an outright breach of contract, unless something buried on page 527 of the applicable terms of service contract says the company can unilaterally demand more money without the customer's prior knowledge or consent.

But given how much American businesses have morally and legally degraded, can one rationally attribute this kind to customer treatment as mostly to Trump and his MAGA politics and policy? After all, Trump has (1) deregulated businesses, (2) blocked most (nearly all?) ongoing and new federal law enforcement against businesses, and (3) takes bribes from businesses to give them want they want to buy from him. Who or what is going to hold Pxy corp., or whatever the company's name is, accountable? Certainly not the FBI, DOJ or FTC. They work for the criminal organization Trump Inc.  

Q1: Is this more evidence that the American AI business model is crap because American style AI costs far more to provide than can be significantly made up for by consumer subscriptions? 

Q2: Is connecting what Pxy did with Trump politics an example of TDS-2, unreasonably over the top, or otherwise just too irrational to take seriously?

Clinical terminology 🤪:

TDS-1 = Trump derangement syndrome in Trump's deranged mind and the minds of his supporters

TDS-2 = Trump derangement syndrome in the minds of his critics

Info sources:

AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough - The returns on trillions of dollars of spending are deeply uncertain 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Business Model: How AI-Native Companies Make Money - AI-native companies pay real money to serve every query. Traditional software as a service (SaaS) products incur minimal cost to serve one additional customer after the software ships. AI products pay to compute on every interaction, and that cost varies by customer, query complexity and the model that handles the request.

MAGA politics & policy update: Lying, corruption, incompetence, wrecking relationships

Lying, corruption & incompetence

Trump and MAGA elites aren't hiding their true intentions, corruption and incompetence any more. Sometimes, their screw-ups just can't be hidden.  

An article about Trump's failed attempt to fix the reflecting pool, Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’, showcases blatant lying to the public and courts, and ghastly incompetence and corruption. Things are going just as expected. Trump's corrupted DOJ falsely accused an innocent person of vandalizing the reflecting pool. However, court proceedings required the DOJ to disclose evidence of vandalism. It turns out there was no vandalism. The repair job was completely botched. Charges dropped and MAGA prosecutors could not figure any way to keep persecuting the victimized defendant. Trump has called the repair job an astounding success.

The repair job on the water purification system failed leading to an algae bloom because Trump gave out a no-bid, non-competitive contract to a major Trump donor who had little relevant experience. That's blatant corruption. The repair job on the coatings that Trump falsely said were vandalized was also a no-bid, non-competitive contract to a different but also inexperienced contractor. There were two Trump repair jobs, the pool coating, and the water purification system. Both failed. That is pure incompetence. Link, link, link

Wrecking families and relationships

One of the cruelest and saddest aspects of Trump and MAGA demagoguery is the intense weaponization, polarization and divisiveness of politics. That was intentional. In addition to mass deceit of a significant portion of the public, a predictable result has been serious damage to millions of American families and to friendships. Damage from polarizing MAGA demagoguery is seen in both American families that are not recent immigrants families, and to immigrant families. 

One paper, Political breakups: Interpersonal consequences of polarization, described “political breakups” as losing relationships with friends, family members, romantic partners, or coworkers due to political differences. It's a real thing. data from 2025 indicated that ~37% of Americans reported having had a political breakup, mostly with friends. The researchers simply say that political polarization is driving many Americans apart. 

As expected for immigrant families, Trump family separation policy rips families apart. The 2024 paper, Mental Health Implications of Family Separation Associated with Migration Policies in the United States: A Systematic Review, makes clear that damage to many affected families is often quite serious. The data indicate that family separation or fear of it may result in depression, anxiety, behavioral and emotional issues, sleep disturbances, and stress or distress in both affected children and parents. 

A 2024 article Time published, How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America, stated that ~10% of American families are estranged from a close relative(s) due to political differences. About one-third of American adults reported feeling uncomfortable at a family gathering in the past year because of a relative's political views. Link, link

Trump's divisiveness is intentional. He is not just divisive but anti-democratic. He normalizes personal authoritarian rule, attacks institutional constraints. He and uses his public office and public trust as resources to exploit for private gain. 

Although Obama was divisive, that was unintended. That was largely due to the fact that he was a Black man. Racists and bigots were enraged at his election and re-election. He was thus a polarizing president but nonetheless still accepted democracy, the rule of law and civilized politics. That is unlike Trump who relies heavily on dehumanization and demagoguery against immigrants, political opposition and democracy itself. Link

A poll that might be meaningful

Context

Polls are sometime misleading. The farther away the election, the less predictive the poll. Polls can miss because of sampling error, nonresponses, weighting choices, or wording effects. It’s usually best to treat a single poll as a snapshot, not rock solid truth. Despite weaknesses, polls are usually only practical way to for the public get a feel for public sentiment. Poll data is sometimes reasonably accurate. Some people believe that their personal experiences and knowledge accurately reflect majority public sentiment. Nearly all of those people are wrong too often to be taken seriously because personal opinions are not reliable substitutes for systematic polling.

The CNN poll

A recent CNN poll, Americans doubt Trump is paying enough attention to the country’s most pressing issues, released data that feels reasonably accurate and unusually important. Several data points seem to reflect a new, growing understanding of Trump. They are (1) Trump’s public approval is 34%, (2) 73% say he is out of touch with ordinary Americans, (3) 66% say he he does not put the country’s good above personal gain, and (4) 57% say he lacks the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively. Collectively, those data points suggest that a significant portion of the American people have MAGA policy fatigue coupled with an apparently major public rejection of his character, self-dealing (corruption), and fitness to govern. Apparently, Trump’s incompetence and corruption are finally sinking in with a lot of people.

Source

For people who have been arguing Trump’s extraordinary self-centered corruption and incompetence for years, this looks like a little bit of long-overdue vindication. But is it also frustrating that it has taken so damned long for this partial public awareness of what has been and should have been obvious at least since 2017. Will this public understanding make any difference in terms of defense of democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties against Trump and his corrupt authoritarian MAGA onslaught? There is no way to know. This may already be too little, and too late.

Q: Is it reasonable to assert that (1) even with this poll’s mild wording, most Americans now see Trump as venal, self-interested, and unfit, and (2) CNN’s data analysis treats this as evidence that “late-stage Trumpism” is losing its grip because public skepticism is no longer limited to one scandal or one issue, but instead it extends to Trump’s core persona and abuse of power?

Info sources:

Key Points to Remember About Polling in the Run-up to Election Day — Pre-election polls can be helpful in thinking about what to expect on Election Day, but they are not predictions of the election outcomes.

Election polls are 95% confident but only 60% accurate — we have found that the actual vote total for a given candidate fell within the 95% confidence interval for just 60% of the polls. This degree of accuracy was reached only when the polls were conducted in the week before an election; accuracy was worse for polls conducted earlier. ….. when laypeople read about poll results, they tend to overestimate the poll’s accuracy

We’ve Officially Entered the Twilight of Late-Stage Trumpism — It’s all there in a new CNN poll, and it’s heartening to see: Large majorities are sick of Donald Trump’s vanity, venality, and megalomania.

Trump Holds the American People in Total Contempt — To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption. ….. Trump’s corruption, which is so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics. The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion.

Source: Data as of Jan. 20, 2026

The Frustration Files: Trying to explain the authoritarian threat to people who see threat

Source

Poll data indicates that most Americans believe there is serious threat to American democracy. Despite that understanding, most still really do not get it. Most still believe that their positions and protections are safe. They cannot see the major losses to their own wealth, power and protections that Trump, MAGA elites and allied demagogues are quietly, constantly inflicting on Americans and the public interest.

Simply put, MAGA politics and policy doesn’t just steal money. It takes money and power by deceit, coercion and whatever other means will work. It uses stolen money to stay in power, and it uses that added power to steal more. MAGA is engaged in a vicious cycle of corruption and tyranny.

On the propaganda front, MAGA politic and policy is all about pretending to be for the average person, while being for the elites at the expense of average people. Nearly all those Trump and GOP voters really, sincerely believed they were voting for their own interests and defense of democracy and the rule of law. By now it is clear they were horribly wrong because they were badly deceived.

The hard thing to explain here is that MAGA's authoritarian kleptocracy is usually incremental and bureaucratic. It is usually not flashy and cinematic. It usually works by exploiting existing institutions such as courts, banks, tax agencies, the media, finance, and election rules. Average people experience fragments of the damage spread out over time. There is no single obvious catastrophic takeover in a few days. That slow burn through the core of democracy and rule of law makes it easy for morally rotted, corrupted politicians or media figures to say “nothing major has happened”. They say that while knowing full well that democracy and the rule of law is being gutted, causing wealth and power to flow from us and the public interest to them and allied special interests.

Q1: Is it plausible to believe that many or most rank and file Trump and MAGA voters were and still are deceived and betrayed by MAGA demagoguery, lies, slanders, crackpottery and irrational emotional manipulation?  

Q2: Is it plausible that many Americans recognize corruption, inequality, and democratic fragility in the abstract while still underestimating how directly MAGA forces are eroding everyday rights, bargaining power, civil liberties, public wealth, and economic security?

Info sources: 

Can Educating Citizens about Democratic Backsliding Increase Engagement with Democracy? -- “Research shows that citizens in democracies often struggle to recognize when their own democracy is under threat, as leaders will try to justify undemocratic actions as necessary to protect democracy or reduce corruption ..... Our research offers a  first step in demonstrating that informing people about how democratic backsliding unfolds increases awareness of threats to democracy, but much more research is needed to understand how to translate that awareness into real-world action.” 

Why a growing number of Trump supporters are experiencing voter’s remorse -- Twenty percent of Trump supporters with postgraduate degrees expressed a reluctance to vote for Trump if given a second opportunity. ..... 31% of independents who voted for Trump in 2024 would not vote for him again in an election do-over

Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election -- More than three-fourths of Americans (77%) believe that the country is going in the wrong direction, compared with only 22% who believe the country is going in the right direction. ..... Majorities of white Christians — including white evangelical Protestants (77%), white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (60%), and white Catholics (57%) — believe American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the worse.

The Effect of Increasing Wealth Inequality on U.S. Democracy at the State Level -- Wealth has become so unequally distributed at this point, and has increased so wildly throughout the last 25 years, that we are living in a totally different reality than even in the 1990s. I don’t think we realize that enough. At the very top, some people are simply above any consequences for their actions.

Americans Sound the Alarm over Corruption and Democratic Erosion -- Of all the possible threats to the United States, Americans rank government corruption and weakening democracy as the top two most critical threats to American interests, signaling anxieties over the health of the political system itself.

The role of racial bigotry and racism in MAGA politics and policy

Context

A NYT Magazine article (not paywalled), What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right, raises the issue of how and why the GOP radicalized over time. The article reports that after Trump took office in Jan. 2025, Heritage was pushed aside. Heritage was the source of Project 2025 and the still-secret 180-Day Playbook that was given to a few MAGA elites on how to implement Project 2025. After Trump was sworn in, Heritage tried to get back to the center of power, but it sank into a vicious, still ongoing in-house conflict. The old guard of establishment experts were swamped and attacked by a surge of radical younger MAGA authoritarian kleptocrats. Those MAGA operatives are hell-bent on remaking Heritage into their own version of a Trump-style organization. Their tyranny and kleptocracy tactics are (1) being online all the time, (2) being ruthless in fighting culture wars, and (3) vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar politics grounded in evidence-based pro-democracy, pro-rule of law conservatism. This new generation of MAGA elites isn't evidence or reason based. It is almost completely wealth and power ideology-based.

That is the tyrannical and corrupt moral rot now taking control of most of America's non-left political universe. As far as these young MAGA crusaders go, things need to get a lot better to attain their vision of what they want Heritage and the GOP to be. These young MAGA elites are waging war on democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. They want things to get a hell of a lot worse than they are now. MAGA's war isn't remotely close to being over. 

The rise of extremist MAGA authoritarianism & kleptocracy

That's a complicated story. Multiple factors were and still are in play. Factors include elite and social polarization, deeply aggressive and corrupting donor politics, a corrupted rule of law for MAGA-aligned elites and corporations, wage stagnation and inflation with economic pressures, corrupted media ecosystems, and uncompromising GOP institutional hardball. But also among those major factors was and still is immigration. Just beneath the surface intense anger and fear about legal and illegal immigration are powerful emotional drivers of racism and race bigotry.   

Racism and racial bigotry

MAGA demagoguery has played on and enormously amplified bigotry and racism among a minority of Americans, nearly all of whom are aligned with Trump and MAGA authoritarian politics and policy. Racism and racial bigotry are important components of MAGA's wealth and power movement, primarily for culture war extremists. Racial animus helps keeps fear and anger alive for a lot of the rank and file. Some of the elites have the same nasty feelings, mainly those in the Christian nationalist theocrat crowd. Absent religion, most oligarchs and dictators like Trump generally don't care much about immigration, with their focus on wealth and power, not culture war or race. When the autocrats and oligarchs do care about non-white immigration, it is used politically to emotionally mobilize voters, e.g., by fomenting irrational or baseless anger, fear, resentments, feelings of threat or victimhood, etc. 

Trump and allied elites repeatedly use immigration as a political weapon. There is solid evidence that Christian nationalism overlaps with white supremacy and anti-immigrant sentiment. There is a significant Christian theocratic cadre among MAGA elites. Clearly, the issue cannot be reduced to religion alone. Sometimes the elites use immigration and race for public influence to serve their own labor, status, and control goals. Racial culture war goals can thus be secondary.

What appeared to be a significant crystallizing stimulant to racial animus in the MAGA movement was the election and re-election of Obama. That set millions of Americans on edge. To make matters a lot worse, MAGA demagoguery ruthlessly exaggerated racial resentments and fears with and fabricated white threat and victimhood narratives. Empirical evidence from research and reporting consistently link MAGA politics to white grievance, racism, and hostility to immigrants. That is particularly true for the movement’s rank and file. 

The bottom line is that racial animus and Christian nationalist ideology are central to MAGA’s mass politics. Oligarchic and autocratic interests exploit those grievances to consolidate elite (and allied corporate) wealth and power. Thus, not every elite actor is motivated primarily by racism. Even without immigration politics would not vanish absent religion.

Regardless of when Trump exits from politics, the MAGA movement and its element of racial bigotry and racism are not going to go away.

Q: Is racism and racial bigotry a significant factor in the rise of MAGA authoritarianism, or is it trivial or completely non-existent?

Info sources:

Racial resentment fueled Jan. 6 rebellion and opposition to House probe, scholars find -- In their analysis, the resentment syncs with support for former President Donald Trump and a message at the core of his Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement: that white people are unfairly losing out to groups that are getting advantages that they haven’t earned and don’t deserve.

The Deepening ‘Racialization’ of American Politics - Obama was a lightning rod. Trump is a lightning strike 

Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations? -- America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it. Indeed, the insurmountable problem for Obama was that he reached the mountaintop on day one of his presidency.

Race and Politics in the Age of Obama -- Race has rarely mattered more in US politics than it does now. The election of President Obama has laid bare the racial divisions that continue to fracture the United States. ..... Many hoped that the election of the first black president of the United States would signal the end to what may rightfully be called the continuing significance of race.

Defining Oligarchy: The Fusion of Wealth and Power in American Democracy -- [Oligarchy] represents a form of governance focused on preserving the political and economic influence of the wealthy by securing the approval of the rest of the population.

Is the U.S. becoming an oligarchy?

How Christian Nationalism Promotes White Supremacy: An Examination of Racial Stereotypes -- Findings suggest Christian nationalism promotes White supremacy more by promoting a higher view of White Americans (the “prototypical Americans”) than promoting a lower view of racial minorities.

MAGA movement - American political movement -- The MAGA movement, often referred to simply as MAGA, or Make America Great Again, was founded on the belief that the United States was once a “great” country but has lost this status owing to foreign influence, both within its borders (via immigration and multiculturalism) and without (via globalization, or the increased integration of multiple national economies). 

A systemic approach to the psychology of racial bias within individuals and society -- systemic factors operating across levels — from the interpersonal to the cultural — contribute to the production and reinforcement of racial biases in children and adults. We consider the effects of five systemic factors on racial biases in the USA: power and privilege disparities, cultural narratives and values, segregated communities, shared stereotypes and nonverbal messages.

Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking -- prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.