What If, Somehow, It All Works Out in the End?

A historical case for quasi-optimism.

The American flag is reflected on the glass of a hotel at Ground Zero in New York (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

I want to jump up to a very high level today and give you a best-case scenario for how this all ends.

It’s not a prediction and it’s not hopium. But I want us to be open to possibilities other than “America looks like Hungary in four years.”

It’s important not to be addicted to doom. I tend to take a fairly dark view of . . . everything. But I try to base that on analysis and not compulsion.

As we gear up for the next four years this is one of our challenges: To be clear-eyed and honest. To never be Pollyanna. But also to be open to the reality that good things can happen.

One of those good things is you guys. You’ve built this community with us, one day at time. It’s special. And we’re going to keep tending it, growing it, and leaning into it.

If you’re not a member of Bulwark+ yet, I hope you’ll join us. This isn’t the time to retreat. It’s the time to build.

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1. GWOT FTW

When’s the last time you thought about the GWOT?

Sorry. Let’s back up. Do you remember what GWOT means?

It’s the acronym for the Global War on Terror and it was a big deal for a decade of our lives. But I bet you haven’t thought about the GWOT in a long time.

Next question: When did the GWOT end?

Can’t really say, can we?

Here’s what we can say about the GWOT:

• Beginning on September 11, 2001, the war on terror became the central issue in American politics.

• It not only changed politics prospectively, but retrospectively, too, coloring much of how we thought about the late 1990s when terrorist acts, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attack on USS Cole, began ramping up.

• The war on terror became the locus for nearly all domestic politics. Questions about privacy, morality, law enforcement, foreign policy, military affairs, economics, and even the proper scope of government became spokes rotating around the GWOT.

• Our two political parties became defined primarily by their views about the war on terror, with one viewing Islamist terrorism as an issue requiring military intervention and the other viewing it through the lens of law enforcement.¹

• There was a major philosophical debate about whether or not the war on terror represented a civilizational test of the liberal order, with theocracy mounting a challenge to Francis Fukuyama’s End of History.

And then, one day, we looked up and no one was talking about the war on terror anymore. This epochal struggle had quietly ended.

What’s more: The GWOT ended without any of the debates we had during that era being resolved. We didn’t come to a grand consensus on privacy or torture. We didn’t reach a firm agreement on the balance between the interventionist and law enforcement views. We never even did a final accounting on who had been right and who had been wrong.

America just kind of . . . moved on. Without even realizing it.

So we created a new problem for ourselves.

This new problem is an authoritarian challenge to the liberal order emanating from inside the country and, like the GWOT, it looks like a big, civilizational final showdown.

This new challenge dominates our politics and has cleaved the parties. It has grown to encompass just about everything we talk about these days: economics, free trade, free speech, immigration, the rule of law. These issues now orbit Trumpism the way all of those other issues once orbited the GWOT. Like theocracy, this new problem feels like a challenge to Fukuyama’s End of History.

What if the end state is illiberal democracy instead of liberal democracy? This is a question I think about often. Perhaps you do, too.

But here’s a different question: What if Trumpism resolves the way the war on terror did? Which is to say: What if it just sort of . . . ends. And everyone moves on and we never actually get to a final answer on all of these questions we’ve spent a decade fighting about?

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2. Buildings Roman

Moving on is the American way.²

Trumpism is the third protracted political struggle of my lifetime. The second was the war on terror. The first was the Cold War.

The Cold War had a more concrete resolution than the GWOT. The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989.³ We tend to think of that as the end point of the Cold War. But it wasn’t. Not really.

Communism had started unraveling in the five years leading up to 1989 and it took two more years after the wall came down for the Soviet government to fall and the Warsaw Pact to disband.

We never did a full accounting on the Cold War in American politics. Isn’t that extraordinary? The long twilight struggle between liberalism and totalitarianism had dominated almost half a century of world affairs. America had fought wars—and proxy wars—across the globe because of it. The Cold War was the backdrop for every fight in American politics for 50 years—from Eisenhower’s fears about the military–industrial complex, to the social upheaval of Vietnam, to the nuclear scare of the late 1970s and 1980s.

And yet American political life never bothered to do an accounting of who had been right, and who had been wrong, about this piece or that piece.⁴

Instead, we enjoyed a couple years of quiet, during which we obsessed about Bill Clinton’s genitals.

Then we slid into the next civilizational struggle.

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It is helpful to think about American politics like the city of Rome. As you probably know, Rome was constantly being rebuilt on top of itself:

The modern city sits on top of the detritus of its predecessor cities, arching back into time almost three millennia. As each city took form, existing structures were collapsed or filled in with earth to form the foundation of the buildings of the next stage of the city’s evolution. Buildings rested on other buildings, roofs became foundations as each layer of the city was successively covered up, gradually morphing into the complex archeological layer cake that is modern Rome.

That’s a pretty fair description of American political life.

In other countries and cultures, society can perseverate over the same challenge for centuries. In the Middle East, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been fighting over the Temple Mount for like 1,300 years.

In America we didn’t even bother to do a postmortem on the Cold War.

We just bulldozed all of the old fights and arguments and built the next era on top of them. Then we did the same thing after the war on terrorism wrapped up.

And maybe—if we’re lucky—we’ll do the same thing with Trumpism eventually. These fights about the constitutional order, and the rule of law, and authoritarianism that seem unresolvable today?

Well, maybe they won’t resolve. They’ll just end.

The American people will collapse them, fill them in, and simply build the next era on top of them.

That’s the optimistic view, anyway.

The pessimistic view is that we become Hungary: An illiberal democracy ruled by a gangster regime that has leveraged enough power to sustain itself indefinitely. Or at least until some unforeseen, cataclysmic shock dislodges it.

Really. It could go either way. Please discuss in the comments.

And if you want to build this community with us, come join us.

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3. The Limits of AI

Garrison Lovely has a skeptical piece pointing out that AI has hit some scaling limits and this is going to throw a huge wrench into the economics of the technology:

OpenAI reports that o1 has state-of-the-art performance on challenging math, coding, and PhD-level science benchmarks, beating expert humans in some domains for the first time:

But it’s not yet clear how well this will translate into performance on longer time horizon tasks, which will depend a lot on things like error rate and error correction. 

But there are big questions there still, namely: will the economics allow it?

OpenAI researcher Noam Brown raised this question at last month’s TED AI conference, “After all, are we really going to train models that cost hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars?” Brown said. “At some point, the scaling paradigm breaks down.” . . .

[Y]ou can boost performance on a technical benchmark by either increasing pretraining time (a part of classic scaling) or by increasing the “test-time compute,” i.e. dedicating more ‘thinking’ to the problem being addressed. 

As an example of how this can work in practice, Brown reportedly told the TED AI audience:

It turned out that having a bot think for just 20 seconds in a hand of poker got the same boosting performance as scaling up the model by 100,000x and training it for 100,000 times longer.

So does this mean that new scaling laws are unlocked, and the potential demise of the old ones are no big deal? 

Not so fast. 

The fact that OpenAI did not publish the absolute values of the above chart’s x-axis is telling. If you have a way of outcompeting human experts on STEM tasks, but it costs $1B to run on a days worth of tasks, you can't get to a capabilities explosion, which is the main thing that makes the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) so compelling to many people. 

Read the whole thing.

1. I’m being reductive. Democrats saw a role for the military, but primarily believed that the law enforcement approach would be more effective.

Republicans believed that large-scale military interventions should be the backbone of the U.S. response—but they also saw an important role for law enforcement organizations.

That said, you know what I mean. This cleavage represented a real difference of opinion.

2. If none of you comment on the section headers today, I’m going to be pissed.

3. Even though the Wall fell on November 9, the beginning of the end of the wall occurred on August 19, 1989 with the Pan-European Picnic, in which a few hundred East German citizens temporarily overran a checkpoint between the Hungarian and Austrian border as a test of the Soviet will.

The Russians did not demand a response and this refusal to punish the border crossers set in motion the eventual breaching of the Berlin Wall three months later.

4. I’m talking about a public accounting, with consensus opinions. Not the academic stuff. Historically, the record is pretty clear. The people who saw the Soviets as a totalitarian menace were correct. The people who covered for and excused communism were incorrect. Deterrence worked as a doctrine. A peaceful resolution to the Cold War was possible.

Oh, and the Red Scare stuff of the ’50s and ’60s wasn’t entirely a paranoid delusion. McCarthy and other red baiters were conspiracy cranks. But the Soviets really did try to infiltrate many American institutions—both cultural and governmental.

To anyone who wants to understand this era, I highly recommend Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. It’s a profound book in many ways, but the section that hit home most for me was Chambers’s explanation of why he (and so many of his contemporaries) threw in their lot with communism.

Short version: The trauma of the First World War was so incalculable that young people decided that the old systems and institutions could never be trusted again. They were willing to try anything to avoid another conflagration. And both communism and fascism appeared on the scene as potential alternatives.

Witness is one of the reasons I’m convinced that the First World War, not the Second, is the most important historical event of the twentieth century.