A Comeback at NYRB

 I have been reading the New York Review of Books since the late 1960s, and I think I started subscribing in the early 1970s.  That was the era of its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, and for several decades it featured numerous articles by critical liberals like my old friend Stanley Hoffmann, Theodore Draper, Hannah Arendt, I. F Stone, and many more.  Such authors wrote frankly and often brilliantly about the failures of the United States government without arguing, like so many of my contemporaries, that it was by nature hopelessly imperialistic, racist, and corrupt.  Epstein and Silvers both died some time ago, and in the last decade or more--and particularly since 2020--I had to admit to myself that I was only renewing my subscription because I couldn't exile such a long-term family member from my house.  The cultural and political criticism in the NYRB became increasingly woke, and I wasn't impressed by the Irishman Fintan O'Toole, who has become their leading political writer.  Recently, however, I have found more to like in the issues that have arrived on my doorstep, and I want to discuss two articles in the September 25 issue, at least one of which is available online to anyone.

None of the articles related directly to the Trump Administration.  The events of the last few weeks have told us a lot about where it is going.  President Trump has publicly ordered the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, to indict James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff, and has replaced his previous appointment of the US Attorney in Eastern Virginia with one of his personal lawyers, a woman with no prosecutorial experience, to secure the Comey indictment just days before the statute of limitations will rule it out.  Donald Trump evidently regards the federal government as another corporation that he has managed to take over, every employee of which has the duty of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.  The Justice Department is now his personal legal firm.  Some of his subordinates are thinking about using the RICO Act to prosecute any important institution, such as George Soros' foundation, that has given financial support to left wing projects.   60-90 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were vastly expanding the role of the federal government in American life, some conservatives warned that "a government big enough to give you everything you need is a government big enough to take away everything you have," and leading universities are now learning that lesson the hard way.  And for reasons known only to himself, Trump has given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the power to undo important parts of the public health revolution that has saved so many lives over the last century and a half. He is eliminating the regulatory role of the federal government, disrupting our economy with tariffs, and pushing for more and more deportations of immigrants.  Yet in the midst of this, a review by one Mark O'Connell of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, enlightened me about other equally momentous developments that hadn't crossed my radar.

Alexander Karp is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, which he founded in 2003 along with Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Ebay.  Zamiska is one of his in-house lawyers and did the actual writing.  Born in 1967 to a Jewish father and black mother in Philadelphia, Karp met Thiel at Stanford,. and initially wanted to become a social theorist.  He is now the highest-paid CEO in the world (he made $6.8 billion last year) and evidently one its most important social engineers.  Palantir was developed to use information technology to meet the enormous new intelligence needs of the Bush II administration after 9/11.  According to the review, $2 million from the CIA helped to finance it.  During the first Trump administration it worked closely with ICE to build datasets of illegal immigrants to plan raids and deportations, and after October 7, 2023, Karp, a strong supporter of the Israeli government, secured a contract from the Israeli government to plan the war in Gaza.  The Technological Revolution is apparently a manifesto pointing the way to a new role for Silicon Valley firms like his own.  They should, he argues, abandon the woke ideology that dominated much of the industry for the first 20 years of the century and provide AI and other military and political tools to the government to save western civilization in its ongoing struggle with geopolitical rivals.  That presumably refers to Russia and China, but the review, at least, never specifically identifies them.  In any case, the Ukraine war has proven that every major nation has to begin building up a new arsenal built largely on drones and AI, and that has led to new contracts between the federal government and Palantir, as well as other leading technology firms.  I was astonished to find this new information in the review: "In June the US Army launched something called Executive Innovation Corps, which it described in a press release as “a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” Under the program, four high-level tech executives were commissioned into the army reserve as lieutenant colonels. The four new officers were Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar; Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth; OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil; and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer."  Some industrial executives came to Washington to help supervise war mobilization during the First and Second World Wars, but I don't recall any being commissioned. 

Palantir's previous involvement with ICE, of course, suggests that Silicon Valley--once a libertarian bastion--might have a huge role to play in domestic surveillance as well, perhaps stepping into the void left by Kash Patel's evisceration of the FBI as we have already known it.  The purge of hundreds of people around the country from their jobs for having posted unwelcome reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk suggests what might be done along these lines.  And just as I could not have identified Charlie Kirk before his death, I could not have identified Palantir or Karp before I read this review, for which I thank the new editors of the NYRB.  Success in Silicon Valley evidently encourages breathtaking hubris, leading Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, among others, to believe they have the answer to all the world's problems.  I do appreciate that Karp's hubris seems to have encouraged him to explain to the rest of us what is actually happening in the relationship between Silicon Valley and various governments.

The second, equally important review in this issue, by Trevor Jackson, combines Abundance, a well-publicized new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, with Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.  You may easily have heard of Abundance, which apparently argues that Democrats have to return to the New Deal tradition of building things, rather than spending their time obstructing projects pushed by evil institutions, including governments.  More important, to me, is Overshoot, because it faces a most uncomfortable fact for liberals like myself:  we have evidently lost the war on fossil fuels, whose role in the world economy has been increasing, not diminishing.  I quote:

"Overshoot breaks neatly into two thematic portions. The first is a bleak climate history of 2020–2023. 

"'Already by 2021 the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas, and yet it generated the largest surge in absolute emissions—the input that directly determines the rate of warming—in recorded history.'

"They anatomize the world-record profits of the five big oil companies, the immense investment (over $5 trillion, they estimate) by banks in fossil fuel projects, and the ongoing global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants. As the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz showed in his recent book More and More and More, despite the vast quantities of talk and money invested in producing a technological “energy transition,” last year the world burned more coal and more wood than ever before."

I could not have quoted those figures to you but I already knew that this trend, in different ways, has continued to dominate US energy policy as well, and that it is a bipartisan trend.  Yes, the Biden Administration's misnamed Inflation Reduction Act provided a lot of new money for alternative energy and electric vehicle development, but it secured Joe Manchin's critical vote only by promising to increase oil and gas drilling as well.  Europe is a major exception to this picture--it has been reducing greenhouse gas emissions significantly for some time.  That  may account for President Trump's having explicitly attacked the European nations for falling for the "climate change scam" during his recent UN address--he has allied himself with our own fossil fuel industry and wants to destroy their competition.

The authors of abundance, the review tells us, still hope to see fossil fuels eliminated as an energy source, even though they explain that $13 trillion of assets would thereby be lost.  Obviously only Stalinist or Maoist regimes would be able to make this happen--but the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China, which are no longer anti-capitalist, don't seem to be too worried about climate change either.  I think that if and when the consequences of climate change become bad enough to demand action, some form of geoengineering to block some of the sun's rays is much more likely than a real turn away from fossil fuels.  As I hope you have come to understand, my main goal these days is to face reality, and this review helped me do that.

The September 25 issue also includes a review of several new books on abortion by my Harvard contemporary Linda Greenhouse; a review of two new biographies of the black 1950s tennis star Althea Gibson; a review of two books on free speech by Kwame Anthony Appiah; and not one, but two reviews of Sam Tannehaus's new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., by the political scientist Mark Lilla--who is one of the best remaining representatives of the intellectual tradition that initially dominated the New York Review--and Osita Nwanev.  I have read two of those four pieces as well and will get to the other two.  My subscription is safe once again.