What the Midterms Mean

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.liveWhat a difference two years make. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, it seemed as though the MAGA movement had conquered American politics, perhaps for a generation. Democrats were demoralized, the culture wars appeared to be over, and Trump seemed all but invincible. Then came Tuesday’s election. Damir and Shadi unpack the results and what comes nex…

A slightly different episode this week — no Shadi Hamid this time. I recorded this interview with my friend (and Wall Street Journal correspondent) Bojan Pancevski in Vienna about a month ago. The topic was his excellent new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy — a “geopolitical thriller” as Bojan calls it.I then proceeded to travel to Ukraine, got back to the States, got sick, and got overwhelmed by work, so it’s regrettably taken me a while to put this out.The book is nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. Bojan, who has been reporting on (and from) Ukraine since 2014, saw the news of the attack on Sept. 24, 2022 and immediately started calling his contacts in the Ukrainian military and intelligence communities. Pretty quickly, one of them confessed that they were the masterminds behind the explosion. And Bojan got to reporting.The book traces the unlikely development of the plot, its execution, and the subsequent investigation by German authorities. It’s full of very colorful characters, tales of jaw-dropping daring, and plenty of intrigue. (Yes, it looks like the United States knew about the plot, and tried to put a stop to it.) But more than that, the book is about what it is about Ukraine that made this kind of thing possible in the first place. This is the topic Bojan and I discuss in depth. Ukraine’s frontier self-help spirit is the product of a badly governed society, where corruption is rife and where citizens simply don’t expect much from authorities. Ukraine’s anarchic chaos is, paradoxically, the source of its greatest strength.I’ll be writing more about this soon. But in the meantime, give this a listen.And do buy Bojan’s book. It’s really a terrific read. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

Taylor Lorenz knows how to make people mad on the internet. Lately, she’s been doing it by taking on the AI doomers, whom she regards as a quasi-religious movement with an extraordinary talent for accumulating money and power. Damir is delighted to find an ally against the apocalypse crowd. But soon enough the conversation ricochets unpredictably. Shadi wonders whether AI might actually be conscious — or even capable of suffering, which sends Taylor worrying that Shadi’s one step away from joining an AI cult. Taylor, though no fan of Elon, defends X, which in turn send Shadi spinning.From AI agents that manage your inbox, to the future of journalism and creative work, moral panics and women falling in love with chatbots, this one’s got it all.Required Reading:* Taylor Lorenz’s newsletter, User Mag (Substack).* The AGI Chronicles, by Kevin Roose (Book website).* “AI nonprofit will spend $10 million on journalism,” by Max Tani (Semafor).* Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, by Bridget Todd and Michael Amato (Simon & Schuster).* Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (Penguin Random House).* “The Bad Science Behind Jonathan Haidt’s Call to Regulate Social Media,” by Aaron Brown (Reason).* Candice Odgers’s critical review of The Anxious Generation (Nature).* Alice Marwick and colleagues’ 2024 report, Child Online Safety Legislation: A Primer (CITAP). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

Shadi and Damir have been circling a question for weeks: is the American left’s moment real? To find out, they invited Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Know Your Enemy and a socialist since it was, in his words, about as fashionable as collecting model trains. Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, against letting the movement’s fringe run loose — and history embarrassed him each time. So should the left keep pressing? Damir hears something ominous in the pattern. Maybe these positions won because the whole country has slipped into a revolutionary mood, right and left together, and the adults in the room are simply gone. Shadi wants to know whether a movement can inherit the future while losing working-class and black voters, the constituencies it claims to speak for. The Democratic establishment gets a vote too, and Michigan is where it plans to cast it.Required Reading:* Sam’s July 4th tweet. (X)* Know Your Enemy, Sam’s podcast with Matthew Sitman. (Patreon)* Zohran Mamdani’s July 4th speech.* Bhaskar Sunkara on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. (New York Times) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

Damir is back from a sweltering Europe, where some commentators seemed to treat air conditioning as a moral failing. He opens the show with a provocation: the European aversion to AC isn’t about strained grids or shuttered nuclear plants — it’s secular theology, Christian guilt repurposed for Gaia. Shadi, on a mini-sabbatical in New York City (thermostat set well below Mamdani’s recommended 78), mostly agrees, but argues that the new American Left isn’t like the sanctimonious European mainstream. It’s joyous, affirmative, and — in Zohran Mamdani’s case — ruthlessly practical rather than self-flagellating.That sets up the real debate. Damir presses Shadi on what he’s actually signing up for beyond Palestine: Progressive prosecutors? Wealth taxes? Bernie’s proposal for the government to take large stakes in AI companies? Shadi names his red lines — nationalizing industry — but wagers that America’s political culture of individual agency is too deeply rooted for even decades of democratic socialism to undo. Damir isn’t so sure. After Trump’s unchained second term, isn’t anything possible?Required Reading:* Shadi’s thread about the centrality of Palestine in Democratic politics (X).* Jonathan Chait on the DSA’s long march through the Democratic Party (The Atlantic).* Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Amazon). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

This week, we are bringing you a conversation, recorded live at the Times Center in Manhattan last Thursday, between Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, head of the Anthropic Institute and the man behind the Import AI newsletter, and our own Samuel Kimbriel. Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a world where AI starts designing its own successors. That cracks open choices nobody has had to make before. Which sciences do we deliberately speed up? Where do we set the dial between individual liberty and collective control when anyone can summon what used to require a nation-state? And who gets to shape the “personality”—air quotes his—of a tool that talks back?It’s an engaging conversation about the big questions of our time. We hope you enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

In this live taping — a partnership between Wisdom of Crowds, Aspen Philosophy and Society, and Yale’s new Center for Civic Thought — Samuel Kimbriel sits down with political theorist Hélène Landemore and writer Osita Nwanevu to hash out a deceptively simple question: what is democracy actually for?Hélène, whose new book Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule makes the case for sortition — randomly selected citizen assemblies replacing elected legislatures — argues that electoral politics is rigged for the loud, the ambitious and the power-hungry. Osita also wants to rejuvenate democracy, but is much more committed to the idea of elections, and politicians specifically.The disagreement sharpens as they dig into what divides us. Hélène sees most disputes as solvable — get people in a room with the right information, reshuffle constantly to prevent power concentration, and collective intelligence will do real work, even on moral questions like euthanasia. Osita counters that many of our deepest political conflicts are about values, not facts, and no amount of expert testimony resolves whether the state should have the power to execute someone.The conversation was made possible with support from the Gambrell Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

The Iran war has produced an unlikely main character: the Pope. This week, our dear friend and former colleague Santiago Ramos returns to the pod. He joins Christine and Damir to unpack the escalating clash between the Trump administration and the Catholic Church over the war, Trump’s various blasphemies, and JD Vance’s remarkable journey from Catholic conversion to, well, rediscovering Protestantism. The conversation then turns to more interesting matters. What does the Catholic tradition actually say about just war, and does anyone in Washington care? Santi argues that the real story isn’t just about applying just war principles — it’s about the Vatican’s deeper commitment to a post-WWII global order that it sees every American war chipping away at. He draws a sharp distinction between just war and holy war, arguing that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s invocations of divine mandate are what really set off the Pope. Christine is fascinated by the public’s unexpected hunger for moral authority in a cynical age — and by the spectacle of a charismatic, English-speaking, social-media-fluentAmerican pope suddenly becoming the most compelling critic of the administration. And Damir, true to form, grants the Pope his due as a political operator while insisting that the real story is simpler: while this is a stupid war with no rationale, the savvy Pope saw an opportunity to play politics. The conversation ends with an unlikely convergence, as Christine gets Damir to all but confess his belief in original sin.Required Reading:* Christine Emba, “What a Catholic Church Unafraid of Donald Trump Means to the World” (NYT).* Ross Douthat, “Trump’s Blasphemy is a Warning” (NYT).* Jacques Maritain on just war (Commonweal).* Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Vatican).* Phil Klay on just war principles and the Iran war (YouTube).* Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran” (NYT). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

This week, Damir and Shadi are joined by Julian Waller, Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University and co-author of Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism. The occasion is an awkward one for a certain kind of democracy discourse: Viktor Orbán was last weekend thrown out in a landslide by Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, ending a sixteen-year run. So — was Hungary ever really the dictatorship Western liberals spent the last decade insisting it was? If a supposed autocrat loses a vote and walks away, what does that tell us about the category we put him in?The three dig into Orbán’s media capture, why the Hungarian-language internet routed around it, and whether Magyar’s improvised anti-corruption coalition can hold. They then turn to Magyar himself — a former Fidesz insider who ran the Navalny playbook of anti-corruption populism with a nationalist twist — and ask whether his improvised negative coalition can actually govern. Will unwinding Orbán’s institutional capture require exactly the kind of authoritarian hardball the new guy was elected to stop?The final stretch turns to moralizing, on both sides. Why did both the Right and the Left make such a symbol out of a small European country?Required Reading:* Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, by Nathan J. Brown, Samer Anabtawi, Steven D. Schaaf, and Julian G. Waller (Amazon).* Julian’s pre-election epic thread handicapping the Hungarian vote (X).* “A Last Chance for Hungary,” by Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar (Foreign Affairs).* “Authoritarianism, Reform, or Capture? Democracy in Trump’s America,” by Dima Kortukov and Julian G. Waller (American Affairs).* Péter Magyar’s post-election appearance on Hungarian state television (Euronews). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

Samuel Kimbriel was in Italy the other week, where he sat down with Rome-based political theorist Giovanni Orsina to talk about European populism. The conversation starts with Giorgia Meloni, who, Orsina argues, is more a pragmatic traditional right-wing politician than a true populist. It then turns to a deeper things.Previewing his upcoming book Counter-Revolution, Orsina claims that after the 1960s, people became both revolutionary and utopian, turning away from politics to morality, law, and markets. But after 2008, populism emerged as a counter-revolutionary force seeking re-politicization. He warns Europe’s institutions were built for depoliticized times and now are struggling to meet the moment. Can they survive? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe