New Hampshire 2024: The Feel-Bad Story of the Year

How to be a happy warrior in a time of exhaustion and despair.

Programing note: Tonight Tim Miller and Bill Kristol will go live on The Bulwark’s YouTube page at 9 p.m. in the East. Everyone is invited.

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1. Ugh

I used to love primary season. It was like the Olympics for nerds: A quadrennial contest rooted in policy wonkery, history, skullduggery, and math.

I was the kind of dork who stayed up late to watch the New Hampshire primary returns on CBS when I was in middle school. As a reporter, I covered either four or five New Hampshire primaries. Always with a sense of wonder and gratitude. Here, the people met the candidates and took their measure.

It was genuinely remarkable to watch average people be allowed to get close to John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Rick Santorum, or John Kerry. The truth about New Hampshire is that with very little effort, you can personally meet and question every single candidate before you go to the polls.

Throughout my adult life I have never felt as hopeful about America as I have during the week leading up to the New Hampshire primary.

Not no more.

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The hopefulness has been gone for a while.

The 2016 primaries were like the movie Speed 2. You don’t remember Speed 2—why would you?—but it was a bad sequel that sort of worked because it was based on the spectacle of a cruise ship crashing into a supertanker.¹

There’s a morbid fascination about watching an impending catastrophe. You know that the crash is bad, but you can’t look away. You rubberneck.

That’s what the 2016 primaries were like. Not “fun” or interesting in the traditional Nerd Olympics sense. Or patriotic and grand in the way they used to be. But morbidly fascinating.

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The 2020 primaries were conducted in a COVID bubble. They were ahistorical and bizarre—remember the debacle that was the Iowa Democratic caucus, with the “first alignment” and “second alignment” numbers and the reporting app that tipped over?

Like everything else during COVIDtide, the 2020 primaries were grim and rickety. It felt like we were all winging it and just hoping to hold the system together. Again: Neither fun nor interesting.

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And here we are in 2024. We’re out of COVID and back to normal. But now “normal” means that we’re caught in a loop watching the cruise ship heading for the supertanker. Over and over again. The morbid fascination is gone and what’s left is exhaustion and anger.

My sense is that no one is having fun. Out in MAGA land people are frothing at the prospect of getting their retribution on the rest of the country. But they’re not having “fun” the way they did in 2016, when they felt like they had discovered what was either the new punk rock or the greatest reality show of all time.

Anti-anti-Trump conservatives are mad that no Republican has emerged to save them from Trump.

Inside Conservatism Inc. and #TeamNormal GOP politics, they now realize that they’re going to have to publicly defend Trump for another year while privately praying for him to go away—either via health event, jury verdict, or electoral defeat. That’s why they’re so cranky.

Low-information independent voters are sour because they’ve signaled—over and over—that they don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch. Now they’re starting to understand that they’re going to get a rematch, good and hard.

The progressive left is angry at Joe Biden because he didn’t deliver the big, progressive policies they wanted and also because he has been a strong and reliable ally for Israel.

The mainstream of the Democratic party is pissed that they have to beat Donald Trump, and a bunch of radical malcontents looking to play spoiler, and a bunch of rich centrist moderates who simultaneously believe that (1) Biden and Trump are indistinguishable and (2) there is a vast chasm of difference between Biden and Joe Manchin / Larry Hogan.

And finally there are people like me, who belong to the smallest subset of them all: Those who have been pleasantly surprised by Biden’s first term and view it as successful by nearly every objective measure. Those of us holding this view are regarded as lunatics by 70 percent of the country.

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2. You Mad, Bro?

The end result is that everyone is angry at everyone else. We’re so exhausted and stressed and fragmented that even the nominal members of our “team” from other parts of the coalition feel like enemies.

I know I’m tired and agitated and not always being my best self.² The New Hampshire primary—a day I used to celebrate and treasure—has become a source of dread. Actually, the entire prospect of the next 10 months fills me with angst. I don’t know how we’re supposed to do it.

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I’ve always admired the “happy warriors” in politics. Not the shit-stirrers, who get off on conflict. I mean the folks who genuinely believed that politics was a tool for making people’s lives better and were in it because they liked people.

When I think of happy warriors I think of Bill Kristol above all others. But also Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

But here’s the thing: It’s easy to be a happy warrior when you’re working to build stuff and make the world a better place. It’s a lot harder when you’re just trying to keep the world from coming apart.

And that’s what we’re doing in 2024. We have to save democracy again?

We have to win an another election, so that we can then win another series of court fights, so that we can then hope that Congress doesn’t throw out electoral votes, so that we can then hope that armed troops protect the transfer of power, so that 40 percent of the country can marinate in conspiracy theories while denying the legitimacy of the federal government?

Oh, and if we succeed in holding this mess together, we’ll probably have to do it again in 2028, too.

Great. Sign me up. 🙄

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You know who my inspiration for happy warriors is these days?

Sarah Longwell.

She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t indulge in self-pity. She doesn’t get angry at the universe.

She just rolls up her sleeves and works.

I’m sure part of this is just how Sarah’s built. But part of it must be a conscious choice she makes, every day.

She chooses to build coalitions instead of creating divisions. She chooses to meet people where they are instead of looking down on them.³ She chooses to embrace the moment history has placed her in, instead of wishing she lived in less interesting times.

Sarah looks at that litany I mentioned above—that if we succeed in holding the system together, we’ll probably just have to do it again in 2028, too—and instead of being exhausted and angry, her response is: Great. Sign me up.

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So that’s my message for today: It’s okay to be exhausted. It’s okay to feel beat-down and stressed-out by the task that has been set before us.

But we can choose to resist the urge to divide people and focus on uniting them. We can choose to show one another grace and call each other to be our best selves.

We can choose to be like Sarah and to make this journey together. Because this is the moment we have been given and history has its eye on us.

I’m grateful to all of you for this community we’ve built. And I’m going to try to do right by you every day from now until the election, and beyond.

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3. AI War

Phillips O’Brien has a piece about AI and warfare that is worth your time:

One of the most dangerous Russian weapons for Ukrainian troops is the Lancet-3 “kamikaze” UAV. Its been equipped with AI processing capabilities (only made possible by the Russians having access to western parts). . . .

In lay-person’s terms, the AI “analytical and image processing” abilities are the kinds of thing that can be used to send the Lancet out to attack western supplied vehicles in the Ukrainian army. For instance, the AI can identify particular shapes that exist only on the western vehicles, and when it finds one of those shapes, it will automatically dive in for an attack.

Ukrainians are also relying more and more on AI in their UAVs (and Sea Drones as well). There have been reports that Ukraine is using AI for all parts of UAV operations—from taking off, to identifying targets, to deciding when to attack. . . .

And UAVs are only one example of how AI is being used. More and more, it seems AI is being used in artillery fire. The Ukrainians very recently claimed that they are equipping some of their French provided Caesars with AI, to speed up their process of target identification and then decide the optimum way to attack. The estimates given were remarkable. According to Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense, Lieutenant General, Ivan Gavrylyuk, AI enabled Caesars would have multiple advantages, including an savings in the time needed to locate and bring the correct fire on a Russian target—which could lead to major ammunition savings (a crucial consideration in this war). He “suggested the use of AI could offer a thirty percent saving in ammunition used while increasing accuracy and on-target effect. This alone would recommend the project effort but the potential to reduce a mission execution is equally valuable.” . . .

Before Feb 24, 2022, the working assumption in the US was that a human would always be in the counter-battery loop. I wonder if this is still the case. If AI can allow for faster counter-battery fire, with the optimum ammunition on target, it will provide a major advantage over the side not having it.

Read the whole thing.

1. Followed by said cruise ship crashing headlong into a coastal town.

2. It’s no fun to have a man you admire liken you to the KKK.

3. Yes. I know.