A recent leak of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s group chats has revealed that he’s quite happy to see our university system destroyed if it will keep out foreigners and humiliate the elites who “actively discriminated against” people like him. The messages are at times quite shockingly racist in their content, referencing how “the combination of DEI and immigration” are “two forms of discrimination” that “systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

Less shocking but no less notable is his contempt for elite centers of learning. He declares “Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” a remarkably delusional statement. Andreessen has made no secret of the fact that he feels he and his tech oligarch peers have been betrayed by elite institutions and the Democratic party. But the reality is that they are the ones who have betrayed not only their country, but the very system which made their fortune and status possible.

The partnership

The history of the Internet is a history of the peculiar partnership of government, academy, and industry that are the foundation of the American model of innovation and growth—warts and all. Most people have heard of ARPANET, the precursor to the more broadly available Internet. That came about as a result of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) scientists Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who developed TCP/IP, the protocol that allows computers to talk to one another and still forms the basis of the Internet today. 

In 1971, recent MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson was working at a firm with access to ARPANET and developed the current basis for email. That same year, Abhay Bhushan—an international student from India in a master’s program at MIT—developed the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

The web specifically, including HTML which websites are written in, was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and others at CERN—an example of how investment in advancement anywhere produces benefits well beyond the countries that invest in them. Berners-Lee developed a rudimentary browser to test the concept, but the first browser to gain any traction was Mosaic, developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993. In 1994, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded “a large grant” to NCSA to continue developing Mosaic.

Among those who worked on Mosaic at NCSA was Marc Andreessen. He is also, of all the names mentioned so far, the only person who went on to become a billionaire, and indeed is one of the 2000 richest men on the planet. He was well positioned to take a product to market because of the work he was able to do as part of a research organization (NCSA) within a public research university. We have already covered the specific federal grant that went to Mosaic. After reaping the benefits of that public infrastructure and investment, Andreessen went to the private sector, where he developed Netscape Navigator, eventually selling his company to AOL for billions of dollars.

Obviously, much of Andreessen’s fortune has come from his subsequent successes as a venture capitalist. Yet without that very first success, there’s little chance he could have become a big time VC in the first place. And now he has betrayed the very system that made his success possible; the system in which he and a handful of others like him have profited disproportionately relative to their contribution.

Industry’s role

The American system is not an unbridled free market, and that’s a good thing. It is also not central planning, either, and that’s a good thing as well. America in the second half of the 20th century sought to create a mixed system that offered the best of every component. Public financing would provide a stable stream of resources for work that was potentially beneficial to the public yet difficult to make a business case for. Alongside actual government agencies doing research and development directly, universities and other research organizations created the institutional environments that fostered productive research and scientific collaboration. Finally, investors and entrepreneurs searched for opportunities to take something to market. 

This does not mean that industry’s role was merely taking what government and the academy developed and offering it to consumers. Businesses can conduct original research as well; for example, in 2023 private firms spent $735 billion on R&D. But the main role of industry in practice is to take things the final 20 percent (or less) they need to go to be ready for the public. A good deal of R&D itself is more about setting aside time and funds to work out the kinks of things originally conceived somewhere in the partnership between government and the academy. This is an incredibly important role and one that is easy to underestimate the value of. If you build out cable infrastructure 80 percent of the way to populated areas but no one ever builds the rest, it is effectively worthless. And 20 percent of the problem doesn’t necessarily mean 20 percent of the difficulty. Sometimes, that last mile is quite hard indeed, and the particular approaches and incentives of business make them the best suited to the task.

On the other hand, sometimes the last 20 percent is much less than 20 percent of the difficulty. Netscape is very much one such case. The Netscape team did not develop HTML, which the browser rendered, nor the websites written in it. They did not develop TCP/IP, never mind the hundreds of thousands of miles of cables and the server infrastructure that made it possible for the tiny ARPANET to become the public Internet. They created one piece of software that performed a simple task well enough to deliver to the market, and they successfully achieved mass adoption. More critically for Marc Andreessen’s personal fortune, Netscape the company was acquired before Netscape the product was ultimately supplanted by competitors.

Again, the difficulties of achieving mass adoption should not be underestimated. The ability to write code that runs at scale may be a relatively hard skill that is straightforward to gauge, but the softer skills of sales and business do matter and aren’t automatic. Innovations cannot change people’s lives if they are never adopted. One part of industry’s role is simply figuring out what particular configuration of an innovation appeals to the public and doing the work to deliver it to them.

Nevertheless, even in this, Netscape’s task was relatively easy. People simply had to download it—on computers built by someone else, running an operation system developed by someone else, connecting to a network built by many others. Yet of all these legions of people doing the work to deliver computers capable of browsing the web, only Marc Andreessen and a handful of others (such as Bill Gates) became megarich, while the rest had largely ordinary salaries.

The deal

The justice of allowing so few to profit so disproportionately has been constantly debated in American history, including the entire era of the partnership of government, the academy, and industry. Nevertheless, while tax rates at the top have varied—although effectively much less so than one might think from changes in the top marginal rate—we have largely tolerated the enormous gains of the few in industry. One defense of this outcome is that the entire point of industry is for private actors to take on the risk of their actions, meaning they stand to lose if they make mistakes and could potentially lose everything. Of course, even this simplifies matters. Private businesses can receive public grants, and the government has frequently stepped in to bail out troubled firms if they are perceived as important enough (or more cynically, are politically connected enough). But most businesses do not receive public grants and cannot credibly expect to be bailed out by the government, and so their owners face the very real risk of failure. High rewards for succeeding are the flipside of shouldering high risks. And both the risk of losses, and the possibility of large rewards, aligns private actors in ways that are beneficial to the public—if constrained within a proper system of laws and regulations.

One can think of industry’s role in this system as a deal made with the government and indeed, with society. It goes like this: you, the investors and entrepreneurs of industry, will figure out which of the innovations that government and the academy and other researchers have done 80 percent of the work on might be valued by the public. You will take the risk that your judgment is incorrect and do the work to carry it the last 20 percent of the way to mass adoption. This will give you the chance to become very rich as a result, which we will tolerate, even if your wealth is disproportionate to your particular contribution, because industry’s role overall is very valuable.

On the other hand, you will be subject to regulatory and political scrutiny, because all of this only works if what you are doing is actually for the public good in the end. There are plenty of things that industry gets its hands in that turn out to be ponzi schemes, outright fraud, or well meaning but ultimately harmful to the public. They do not have perfect incentives to self-police these matters, and even if they did, people are people—quite capable of self-deception and seeking short term gains. The regulatory state exists for a reason.

But of course, there is no such deal. To speak of “deals” of this kind is to indulge in the kind of fiction all too common in the social contract tradition, where rhetoric slips seamlessly from acknowledgement of a fiction to treating it as an empirical fact. We live in a huge, continent-spanning, polyglot, pluralist society, where unanimity has never been in the cards. Many people were never happy with the level of regulation, thinking there was too much or too little. Many people felt (clearly correctly) that the existence of billionaires in our system was not just unjust but actually dangerous for the stability of our politics. Others felt that allowing entrepreneurs to become billionaires was essential for innovation, and indeed far more essential than any of the work performed by government or the academy. Rather than a deal, there has just been a constant renegotiation of the arrangement since the very beginning of it, from FDR to Reagan to today, and the many cycles of turnover in Congress and state governments in between. There are no permanent victories or permanent deals in politics, and this is especially the case in a free and democratic society.

Marc Andreessen believes there was a deal, however. A “Deal, with a capital D” that “was just something everybody understood.”

You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro-gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Left unclear are what the “sins” in question are supposed to be or how much of his money Andreessen actually gave away. At any rate, Andreessen feels that this deal has been broken. It was broken by elite universities, who turned the children of elites into “America-hating communists.” And it was broken by the Democratic Party, which “decided that we were to blame for Trump.” The communist millennials who entered the workforce in the 2010s sought to destroy every institution they touched, including the companies invested in by Andreessen-Horowitz, and the Democratic-controlled media abetted them. This escalated when Biden came into office and, for example, “They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I.”

Since “the Deal, with a capital D” had been broken, Andreesen and his cohorts had no choice but to throw their lot in with Trump, who now is making those dealbreakers pay the price. And it’s going swimmingly, from Andreesen’s point of view. He is no longer bound by the terms of “the Deal,” which required him to pay lip service to “all the fashionable and appropriate social causes” such as human rights and equal dignity. 

To his dying day, Andreessen will surely believe that they are the traitors, that he was the one who was betrayed. But the only traitor is Andreessen himself.

The treason of the tech oligarchs

The partnership between government, the academy, and industry was a sweet deal for investors and owners like Andreessen in which they reaped the largest personal rewards of any actor by far. This partnership has been tremendously beneficial for the world in advancing the frontiers of science and technology. And it has been even more beneficial for America itself, our influence in the world, our quality of life, and our military capacity. And it is exactly this partnership that Andreessen has betrayed.

Andreessen and the tech reactionaries were not betrayed by “American-hating communists” backed by the “Democratic machine;” they simply could not be content to be merely rich. Out of spite towards those who disrespected them and contempt for liberal democratic governments that attempted to hold them to the obligations of citizenship and the law, Andreesen and his peers have betrayed the very arrangement that made them wealthy and influential. 

Research universities have been targeted since the very first week of the current Trump administration, and in a way that would put research centers such as NSCA, where Andreessen got his start, at risk. NSF, which paid out a grant for NSCA’s cutting edge work on the Mosaic browser, has faced drastic and illegal cuts and will almost certainly face more for the rest of Trump’s term. Meanwhile, after regulators suspected that the cryptocurrency industry was rife with ponzi schemes (or they ran “incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto” in Andreessen’s words), the Trump administration will be giving the industry an enormous bribe. The tech oligarchs want government cash but not obligations, wealth without duty or any of the basic burdens of citizenship. The rewards of success without the risks of failure, and indeed, they want to be rewarded even when they fail.

They have betrayed the society that enriched them, and have put us at serious risk of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, lawlessness, and stagnation. They have betrayed the values that made that society great, values which they apparently only ever held superficially because they believed it would make them appear respectable. They can no longer be trusted. When the wheel turns once again, the matter of their treachery must be revisited, and a new arrangement must be reconstructed from the wreckage of the old one.

Featured image is NCSA Blue Waters, by HorsePunchKid

On Friday night, Elon Musk’s team gained access to the Department of Treasury’s payments system, which processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the U.S. economy. Social Security, Medicare, agricultural supports, the National Parks—a large majority of government spending flows through this spigot.

Musk’s team not only has the ability to see every government payment, but can make changes to the system—which could mean having the capacity to turn that spigot off. What Musk appears to be attempting is using the payments system to decide what congressionally approved spending will actually occur. If that happens, it will take our unfolding constitutional crisis to a whole new level.

Normally, the federal payments system is apolitical plumbing managed by nonpartisan bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats simply process funds; they don’t make decisions about whether spending is justified. But they have immense unused power, because controlling the federal spigot means they have the capacity to stop any government payment with the push of a button, even if they have never done so.

With Musk at the reins, that power shifts to an unelected billionaire who intends to use it. Don’t like “woke” research? Turn it off. Hate USAID? Cut off the money. Think payments to Lutheran Family Services are illegal? Shut them down. Giving a single individual, let alone one with no official position, such control over the federal government would be extraordinarily authoritarian.

The courts place limits on the use of such power, but they are only one check. Apolitical employees, whose only obligation is to the law, are another safeguard. We also rely on the technical infrastructure itself to ensure that payments happen without disruption. Mucking about with systems that are built on sixty-year-old code could be deeply disruptive to vital government functions, shutting down the Social Security payments many rely on or cutting off payments to small businesses that depend on government contracts for survival.

Trump has already demonstrated his intent to gut parts of government that threaten him or depart from his political allies’ interests or ideology. He has moved toward purging the FBI of independent voices, tried to prohibit funding for whole fields of study, and temporarily halted congressionally approved spending on clean energy.

The effort is unprecedented, but so far it has met with mixed success for two reasons. First, cutting off funds one agency at a time, in the face of reluctant bureaucrats, is a messy, slow and uneven process. Second, it is generally illegal, since the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA) requires presidents to spend congressionally authorized funds unless they receive specific congressional approval not to do so.

With Musk in control of the federal spigot, the “messy and slow” problem would be solved. In agencies like the National Science Foundation, the president does have considerable authority to direct spending, even if it has in the past been delegated to scientists and experts. If the president wants to create ideological litmus tests, he probably can. But even so, it takes time to make unenthusiastic employees review each grant for mentions of gender and equity. Centralizing this power would speed things up considerably.

In other spaces, however, statutes—and more generally, the Constitution’s delegation of spending power to Congress—leave little room for such presidential discretion. Here, control of the payment system would give Musk the technical capacity to hit pause, but would then face legal challenges from the states, businesses, and nonprofits who were intended to receive them. Though the initial lawsuits against Trump’s spending freeze were brought for violating the Administrative Procedures Act, not the ICA, they have already temporarily reversed it.

Eventually, however, such legal challenges would make their way to the Supreme Court, which—though experts disagree on how likely this is to happen—might potentially overturn the ICA as unconstitutional. Should that take place, Trump, and Musk, would have a much freer hand to pick and choose which congressionally authorized funds actually get spent.

At that point, having operational control of the spigot would have even broader implications for Trump’s ability to implement his sweeping, but currently stalled, agenda. For example, Trump wants to control how schools teach history, but without a funding lever, his main power is the ability to intimidate them into compliance. But if Trump had greater direct control over federal funding streams, the pressure to comply would increase, even though Congress has specified that the federal government cannot control local curricula.

One can imagine even more dire scenarios, depending on Supreme Court decisions and the administration’s willingness to ignore the law entirely. In an extreme, but far from unimaginable, example, Trump might retaliate against blue states who refuse to take directives from ICE by turning off Social Security payments to their residents until they comply. This is far beyond the bounds of law, but until now it has also been a practical impossibility. Operational control of the federal payments system would, for the first time, make it a technical possibility.

In addition to politicization and ideological control, having power over the spigot would also open up new avenues for corruption. Imagine Musk with the power to simply turn off funding to those who refuse to invest in his projects, or support his business partners. This, too, is illegal, but at least at present is hard to carry out. That practical barrier would disappear with control of the federal payments system, leaving us only with Musk’s questionable integrity to protect government from abuse.

There are very good reasons that the federal faucet has always been controlled by apolitical bureaucrats. Having a president—or, even more so, an unelected billionaire—hold direct, granular control of nearly seven trillion dollars is power beyond the Founders’ wildest dreams. And we have seen elsewhere, notably in Hungary, that finding ways to use government to defund the opposition has been an effective opening salvo in the expansion of authoritarian rule.

If the Supreme Court cooperates with Trump’s desire to expand his control of the purse, we may be headed in this direction regardless. But even so, there is a difference between an executive with diffuse bureaucratic control of spending, and one with the fully centralized ability to stop the functioning of any part of government. If the latter becomes a reality, we will have taken another big step toward losing our democracy entirely.

Featured image is Women inspecting printed currency at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, by Waldon Fawcett

I will not beat around the bush: the Trump administration offers many possible paths to catastrophe, but at this very moment, none are more likely nor able to come about more quickly than those delivered by Elon Musk specifically. Anything we can do to strike at him, to drive a wedge between him and Trump, we must do. If state governments can find the political will to seize his assets and destroy the basis of his wealth, they should. If foreign governments can, they should do the same. The systems that Musk is mucking around in could very well destroy the credit of the country and send us into the greatest crisis of the past century, at least.

How did it come to this? For most of the 2024 cycle, we focused on Trump, his authoritarian threats, and Project 2025. Musk joined Trump’s cause quite late in the election—roughly the beginning of October. He quickly became the campaign’s single largest donor. Beyond his money, he invested his time and energy trying to stand up a last minute ground game in crucial swing states, almost certainly breaking multiple serious election laws in the process. After the election, he practically moved into Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.

At first there was reason to suppose he would be just another in a long string of Trump courtiers who thought they could be the power behind the throne. If the pattern held, at some point the attention that Musk personally received would hurt Trump’s fragile ego and that would be the end of Musk’s insider access to the president.

It even seemed like others close to Trump might have successfully created some distance, quite literally, by ensuring that Musk would not be able to base his operations within the west wing.

It is still early, but these hopes now appear to be optimistic. While the lion’s share of Trump’s executive orders clearly have Project 2025 as their origin, and other moves are quite consistent with what he promised his entire campaign, the more immediately catastrophic decisions have clearly originated from Elon Musk personally. Indeed, with the spending freezes and the buy-out offer emails, the administration is quite clearly following Musk’s playbook in almost the identical manner he implemented it when he acquired Twitter.

Over at CNN, Zachary B. Wolf observed that We do not know what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the federal government. One question among many that was unanswered at the time of writing was “Has he taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?” It now appears that he may have, according to the White House, but the particulars are vague.

Wolf is not alone in wondering what, exactly, Musk’s role is in the administration, or what the practical limits are on his ability to act. The known details are sparse but telling: we know he has an office, with people nominally under his “DOGE” remit, though we do not know if they or he are actually on the federal payroll or have any other formal relationship to the executive branch or federal government in general. More significantly, the Office of Personnel Management has been staffed with people with strong ties to Musk and his allies. Others have been placed at the General Services Administration; there may be more in the future, and there may be more now that have yet to be reported on. These people are employees of the federal government, and definitely do not have a formal reporting relationship to Musk. Nevertheless, the evidence we have indicates they’re following his lead. Many of them have worked at his companies, some even worked specifically on the Twitter takeover.

Shortly after Trump’s victory, I warned that the biggest proximate risk was that he would take our system down the path of personalism. Of course, at the time, I meant the risk that the administration would expand the personal power of Trump specifically. We have seen that, of course, from a number of moves the administration has made. But no one has seen their personal power balloon more than Musk’s appears to have. His lackeys have run rampant throughout the government over the last few days, gaining access to critical tech infrastructure and sensitive information, in some cases locking out the very people who are meant to use it.

The scholar of non-democratic systems Xavier Márquez has pointed out that personalist systems where patronage is the central component “are characterized by high levels of de-institutionalization, where formal authority is no longer a good guide to the location of power.” Far more than Trump himself, this statement describes Musk, whose unparalleled personal wealth, control of multiple companies, and network of personal and financial ties, put him in a unique position even in an administration staffed by multiple billionaires. So long as the lower level clients remain, it’s unclear that even removing Musk himself from his nebulous position in the administration would do much to dampen his influence.

The de facto power of the Musk network stands to grow enormously if they successfully consolidate their control over federal systems and information channels. Even if they cannot wield it very skillfully, we ought to be alarmed. In the short term, unskillful meddling in systems that disburse trillions of dollars a year could very well cause damage they are unable to patch up after the fact, even if they fail to permanently establish an authoritarian regime.

More than any other actor right now, more than Trump himself, we need to be focusing on Musk and his agents. Whether it’s the spending freeze, terrorizing federal officials, or seizing control of sensitive systems, the actions that pose the most immediate threat to America and the world all have one source: Elon Musk.

A personalist triumphs when everyone else’s power hinges on their dependency to the personalist. Even if we cannot bankrupt Musk or bring him to justice for his many federal crimes, there are things that can be done to make him more dependent on his GOP backers and on Trump in particular than they are on him. This then leaves him actually vulnerable should Trump choose to abandon him at some point.

Any state government that can be persuaded that they ought to step in where the federal executive government has abandoned its duty and punish Musk for breaking crucial laws should seize any assets he has there. They should ban the sale of Tesla in their states and the trading of its stock on any exchange based there.

As for the rest of us, we need to be calling our representatives, including our state representatives, and demanding they take every available measure to hold Musk accountable. We should support opposition media that have been drawing attention to every step Musk and his lackeys have taken; Wired has been particularly effective at this. And when Musk unilaterally reduces the federal workforce or shuts down an agency—something which appears to be imminent—we must be prepared to take to the streets and demand that he be stopped.

Featured image is Elon Musk, by Haddad Media

Donald Trump is moving our country at breakneck speed towards personalist rule. “Woke Corporate Capitalism” has given way to a “parade of CEOs visiting Trump in Florida.” When in the terrifying hours after the January 6 insurrection, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump and hosting companies banned conservative social media site Parler, today Twitter’s owner is a member of the Trump administration and Facebook’s CEO has kissed the ring. Many media outlets who took a more overtly adversarial tone towards the first Trump administration have taken to normalizing his unprecedented and indefensible behavior, either out of fear of retaliation or a perception that their prior approach will generate as much revenue as it did the first time, or both. Some, like the owner of the LA Times, see a greener pasture in embracing Trumpism. Others, like Politico, have been acquired by Trumpist true believers.

It is imperative that we establish a large voice for oppositional media. Every authoritarian knows the importance of crowding out all dissenting voices, through a mix of magnifying their own and suppressing their critics. One common misconception is that the sole or even the main way they accomplish this is through direct censorship. In fact, the tools can be quite varied. In Alberto Fujimori’s regime in Peru in the 1990s, intelligence officer Vladimiro Montesinos made extensive use of bribes. As the political scientist Xavier Márquez put it in Non-Democratic Politics:

One of the striking findings uncovered by analysis of Montesinos’ careful records was the importance he placed on controlling television; bribes paid to TV stations were more than a hundred times the amount paid to politicians, for the simple reason that information that became public via television was the most powerful means of mobilizing opposition. (page 141)

A mix of strategies is always necessary. For the largest media channels, an authoritarian may nationalize them outright, seek to shutter them and replace them with their state-run equivalent, or use legal and extra-legal threats to make them hesitant to be openly critical. Online platforms require a different strategy entirely; while Venezuela or China cannot nationalize the biggest online platforms, they can “pollute the information commons and monitor potentially dangerous people” (page 141) to render them unsafe spaces for coordinating opposition.

In the case of China and regimes that take similar strategies, since the volume of online posts makes it quite impossible to stop all criticism per se, they focus on suppressing criticism that specifically encourages “collective expression.” In short, the sort of expressions that are likely to lead to actual mobilization are targeted, while expressing frustration in even very blunt and vulgar terms is allowed.

The biggest internet platforms in the world are run by companies incorporated in the United States, and the largest share of their revenue by far comes from users that live here and advertisers that spend here. An American authoritarian government therefore has many more options than even the Chinese government has to apply pressure to these platforms. While Elon Musk’s platform was always the smallest of the top social media sites, Zuckerberg’s rapid moves to show submission to Trump is much more alarming. The two together make for a powerful channel of regime propaganda, and “voluntary” moderation on behalf of the regime. In spite of all the fanfare around Project 2025 and the learning that has occurred between the first and second Trump terms, I do not think anyone in his administration is sophisticated enough to take a Chinese-style approach to censoring social media. I do believe that Meta itself has the institutional knowledge to do so.

An opposition must oppose. We must protect media spaces with large audiences where no-holds-barred criticism of the Trump regime is shouted from the rooftops. Here at Liberal Currents, we will continue to do just that. We are joined by a wide variety of niche publications who are just as committed in their adversarial stance. The problem is precisely that we are niche. Montesinos would not have paid a penny for any of us; he didn’t even bother with the newspapers of his day, focusing mainly on television. Those of us willing to take this stance must grow larger, much larger, seizing the market opportunity abandoned by the now-timid larger institutions of media. 

But we must also exert pressure on larger institutions than our own, and on politicians. The way that this is accomplished is twofold. First, though we may be smaller than a New York Times, or a CNN, if our audience includes people who work at those companies, we may be able to persuade them to change what they are covering and how. Second, small publications since at least the days of the original blogosphere have formed a kind of farm system for stories that potentially get picked up by larger outlets. This can be either because some people employed by the latter keep an eye on the minor publications to see if anything worth covering has shown up there, but it can also be because a story from niche publications has gone viral among a large audience, making it too salient for most big outlets to ignore.

To that end, sympathetic spaces such as Bluesky are crucial. Bluesky as it currently exists is vulnerable at the level of governance, so we can’t assume it will remain useful forever. But it is useful today and we must use what we can today. Beyond that, we need to encourage the users there to continue to keep channels of communication open with people who do not use that; to send articles written by opposition media to friends, family, and colleagues over email, group messaging, or whatever channel you might use. Keeping opposition voices accessible among at least a third of the voting age population is critical to avoiding the typical competitive authoritarian scenario.

We will continue to do our part, here at Liberal Currents. If you would like to participate in that, please pitch us at writers@liberalcurrents.com, or support us. Beyond the Liberal Currents community, support others like us, start your own, reach out to your elected officials regularly and build relationships with journalists at big news organizations. All of us must do what we can.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of publications that, at the time of this writing, have remained adversarial in their stance:

• ProPublica
• Mother Jones
• The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Rolling Stone
• HuffPost
• The New Republic
• The American Prospect
• Talking Points Memo
• Dissent
• The Nation
• The UnPopulist
• The Bulwark
• The Contrarian
• 404 Media
• More Perfect Union
• Techdirt
• The Appeal
• Lawfare
• The Handbasket
• Teen Vogue

Featured image is Censorship Board

Over at The Boston Globe, Yascha Mounk tells us that “a return of total resistance would be a bad strategy.” After reviewing the range of tactics employed by the resistance during the first Trump term, he concludes that "none of these attempts to oppose Trump was particularly effective.”

Never one to wait long to take an opportunity to kick liberals while they are down, Samuel Moyn wrote a New York Times column back in November arguing that “The Legal Battle Against Trump Was a Miserable Failure.” Moyn expressed his disappointment that “for decades, liberals have made the mistake of prioritizing legal victories over popular ones.” Moyn is even convinced, despite offering no evidence, that “legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular vote win he could not boast before.”

And being more straightforwardly defeatist, Shadi Hamid at the Washington Post wonders whether “demobilization is for the best. Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests, as he has already threatened to do.” This sounds more like the rationalization of a battered spouse keeping their head down than of a political opposition considering a strategy.

Mounk, Moyn, and Hamid are wrong on all counts. The tactics employed to resist Trump’s first term had varying degrees of success. Sweeping claims like Mounk and Moyn’s can only be made by pundits and legal scholars for whom victory is always a concrete, either-or affair. You either win in court or you lose; you either remove the president in the Senate or you do not. But in political reality, simply buying time has enormous value. Policies take time to implement. Legislation takes time to pass, especially in our legislature. The more successfully Trump’s opposition delays any one policy, any one bill from passing, the fewer policies and bills Trump will implement and pass. In two years, Democrats will have a chance to take at least one chamber of Congress back; two years is a very short amount of time to implement much in our system. Delaying is one of the most tried and true tactics in our system and it was quite successfully employed in the first Trump term. More subtly, a political cost was paid by Trump for being impeached, just as one was paid by Clinton, even if this is harder to quantify in terms of time or votes lost.

Trump did win the popular vote this time, and because that exceeded people’s expectations, people are acting as though he has some sort of broad mandate. But the truth is that he had the smallest popular vote margin since Gore’s in 2000; smaller even than Clinton’s in 2016. Control of the House is even thinner than it was after 2016; indeed it is the barest majority in nearly a century.

Trump does not have a mandate, and we do not have an obligation to be compliant. The greatest risk of all right now is that Trump will successfully grow his personal power beyond what any president has previously achieved and take us down the road to authoritarianism. The signs are already there: all but one of his nominees are pure loyalists with no qualification for office, a Republican House committee chair has been removed purely on Trump’s say-so, and a spending bill was killed on the whim of Trump’s number one billionaire backer. Meanwhile, corporate America is lining up to swear fealty to Trump, most prominently Mark Zuckerberg, who has installed a Trump loyalist on Meta’s board, among other measures to appease Trump and his cronies.

The first steps taken by any authoritarian are to subsume the mass media to the regime and silence opposition press. Until now, however, authoritarians could only take measures to mitigate access to and the impact of major Internet platforms in their countries. America, however, can very much do to those platforms what the typical authoritarian does to locally operated news outlets. Zuckerberg and Musk’s relationships with the current Trump administration paint a dark picture of where these next four years may take us.

We must resist the Trump administration. The stakes are simply too high. We have the tools, if only we can find the political will. We must not shrink from using them at every opportunity.

Featured image is Women's March on Washington, by Mobilus in Mobili