The Unpopulist
Germany's Far-Right Surge Suggests Liberalism's Crisis Was Never Fixable
Why is a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties leading polls in Germany—one of the richest, safest, most democratic nations in history? That unsettling question anchors a comparison of two new books wrestling with liberalism's global retreat. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, in "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?," blames liberals themselves: they abandoned the working class, lost their "moral fire," and let technocratic smugness curdle into an opening for demagogues. His fixes—apprenticeships, "pro-worker AI," better narratives—read like a checklist drafted in search of a problem, and his insistence that reactionary movements exist "only" because of liberalism's failures strains credulity when applied to a country as privileged as Germany.
A more persuasive account comes from British historian Stephen Davies, whose "The Great Realignment" argues something more unsettling: this upheaval couldn't have been prevented, no matter how well liberals governed. Politics, he contends, periodically snaps from one organizing axis to another—once capitalism versus socialism, now nationalism versus cosmopolitanism—driven by deep structural forces rather than policy missteps. If a Trump or Farage hadn't emerged to channel this shift, someone else would have. Davies may underestimate how dangerous populist nationalism is to democracy itself, but his core insight lands hard: the old playbook of fattening wallets won't rebuild majorities when voters are asking not "how am I doing?" but "whose country is this?"
Scott Alexander
A Blogger Challenged Steven Pinker to a Debate—and Wrote 6,000 Words Instead
What began as a tossed-off social media challenge to debate AI risk spiraled into something far stranger: an exhaustive, point-by-point rebuttal that doubles as a referendum on how one of the world's most prominent public intellectuals has talked about artificial intelligence for over a decade. The writer—a blogger who's been tracking AI capabilities since the GPT-2 era—accuses Steven Pinker of repeatedly mischaracterizing the AI safety movement: claiming doomers believe in 100% extinction probabilities (nobody does), insisting they envision "omniscient, omnipotent" machines (the field's own foundational texts explicitly reject this), and citing a RAND study as debunking extinction risk when the study's actual conclusion was the opposite. The piece digs into technical arguments too—why intelligence might be a real, measurable thing extrapolatable from rats to primates to language models, and why AI systems might develop self-preservation instincts without a shred of Darwinian history behind them. But beneath the citations and screenshots is something more personal: a sense of betrayal from someone who calls Pinker an intellectual hero, now watching him, in the writer's view, cherry-pick fringe skeptics as "experts" while ignoring the Nobel and Turing Award winners sounding alarms. The result is part debate challenge, part open letter, part reluctant takedown—a window into how fiercely the fight over AI's future is being waged not in labs, but in the reputations of the people the public trusts to explain it.