I’ve been in a conversation over the last few weeks about a possible piece I might write for another publication about Democrats and the politics of masculinity and power, particularly how this relates to how young men have shifted to the right in the Trump era. I mostly think that this is an issue that affects Democrats generally, and is not just narrowly about this or that demographic group. This has been a theme in lots of conversations at TPM over the last 20 months when it comes to the extra-ideological division among Democrats between “fight” and accommodation and civility. Going back even further, to late 2004, I’ve been writing about what I call “dominance politics,” or, originally, “bitch slap politics.”

I thought of this this weekend because there was a blip of attention to comments from David Brooks on The Newshour. “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.” There are a slew of problems with this. Not least of which are false equivalence and appeals to ethnic hatred and bigotry. Ossoff didn’t call Mike Collins a Nazi. What Brooks is referring to is Ossoff’s debate swipe when he told Collins, “You’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online.” This isn’t some random swipe. It’s been one of the biggest stories of the campaign season that week after week reporters keep finding members of Collins campaign, political operation or family who are associated with far-right or neo-Nazi individuals and organizations or who distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. This is merely an aggressive statement of facts that are unambiguously in the public record. But it’s not the specifics of Ossoff’s attack or Brooks’ tut-tutting I want to focus on here. It’s the more general and more important issue of tut-tutting, elite gatekeeping and how this relates to how Democrats operate in the public sphere.

As we have this ongoing discussion about AI, I want to return to the question of scale and externalities and how they are the defining feature of the Silicon Valley economy. We can’t make any sense of today’s discussion of LLMs and AI without placing it in that context.

“Externalities” are all the byproducts and secondary effects of, in this case, a business enterprise. If you make paint or industrial solvents you create various kinds of pollution in the process. How is that dealt with? Specifically, are you, the paint or solvent maker, responsible for dealing with those consequences? Even more specifically, do you have to pay for dealing with those consequences or are they absorbed by the society at large while the profits of the enterprise go exclusively to you? “Absorbing” those consequences can mean accepting levels of illness, diminished quality of life or simply having society at large pick up the tab for various kinds of remediation. The externalities are really just costs, but often semi-hidden ones. A huge amount of public policy deals with properly or improperly bringing costs and externalities into alignment.