At this point, you will have read numerous takes, predictions and analyses of what four more years of Mr. Trump in the White House means. I promise that I will make this short. I think Sam Harris’ “The Reckoning” offers a good explanation of what went wrong for the Democrats and the liberals. I also enjoyed the discussion between Glenn Loury and Daniel Bessner, even if I strongly disagree with Mr. Bessner on a number of key areas. If you want a longer explanation of the ills that have befallen US Democrats, unrelated to the diagnosis of excessive wokeness and identity politics, you should read Thomas Franks’ “Listen, Liberal”, published on the eve of the Democrat’s first loss to Mr. Trump in 2016. It’s all there, with a straight line back to Frank’s earlier identification of the problem when he asked “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Apart from that, we should also add that Mr. Trump simply ran a superior campaign to Kamala Harris. After all, you don’t win all the swing states through luck or due to bad opposition alone.
Read MoreSome people like to read, some people like to listen, some people prefer to write, while some speak. I am a bit of a mix, and if you are too, it’s possible that you’d prefer to listen to some of the writing on Alpha Sources rather reading it on a screen. Up until recently, that wasn’t really possible unless I either painstakingly, and poorly, recorded myself reading the text, or I paid an artist to do it for me, the latter which is a touch overkill given that I am not charging for access to my blog. Fortunately, AI voiceover technology is getting good, and fast, so good in fact that I am not able to introduce something new entirely; the Alpha Sources audio essay. These essays are powered by ElevenLabs, where I have recently become a subscriber. It’s fascinating what this tool can do, and I have only scratched the service, I am sure. I am kicking off with an audio version of my recent long-form essay, The Fertility Wars. All references and links used in this essay can be found by following the links above. The written essay contains two footnotes, which have been omitted in the audio version.
Read MoreThe political flurry in the US over the virtues of parenthood and a high birth rate is part of a much larger cultural moment in which the debate on the significance of falling global fertility is pitting two increasingly militant and unyielding sides against each other. We have trade wars, culture wars, even actual wars; we can now add fertility wars to the list. When Elon Musk, a US entrepreneur and businessman, calls Ms. Harris an “extinctionist”, because she has linked the reluctance of young people to have children to “climate anxiety”, he means it, just as he means it when he concludes that “the natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”
How to get handle on this? With difficulty, but in the end, hopefully with precision and clarity. First, I will briefly show that the fertility wars have been fought for a long time. I will then draw the contours of three separate positions in the fertility wars today—on the Conservative right, on the left, and a feminist perspective—before offering a suggestion on where this discourse goes next, and where it ultimately ends up, if we are sufficiently unlucky or un-attentive.
Read MoreThere’s been a lot of talk about the political center* in Europe in the past few weeks, in the wake of the French parliamentary elections and the landslide victory for Labour in the UK. Is it reinvigorated, complacent, or perhaps just lucky? I offer two thoughts on this.
Firstly, sometimes a long-in-the-tooth incumbent is sacrificed on the altar of change no matter how reasonable or uncontroversial he or she is. In the context the most recent elections in Europe, this applies mostly to France, where the people has a tendency to throw their leaders under the bus, for no other reason that they’ve been in power for a bit too long. But I think it applies to England too, to an extent. Rishi Sunak and his cabinet weren’t that bad, or more specifically, the Sunak government was a lot of less controversial and risk-seeking than its Tory predecessors. But in the end, the weight of dissatisfaction and disillusion with previous iterations of Conservative cabinets were too much to bear. The Tories received the drubbing they deserved, having put their faith in a toxic mix of volatility and incompetence under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The doomed political and economic project of Brexit looms large in this story too. Whatever Labour decides to do with this smelling carcass of a political legacy, it brought the destruction of the Conservative party, and the right in UK politics, as we know it. Perhaps for that reason, Starmer will be inclined to leave it smelling for a bit longer, to remind people of what they’ll get should they consider jumping back into the Tory fold.
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