Claude on the New Rules of Post-Truth Society

TLDR; We discuss a number of topics all themed around our new and dangerous Post-Truth society:

• Understanding the effectiveness of Trump’s 2015 claim Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK, how this was the beginning of a new political era where new rules replaced the old rules
• The views expressed by Vlad Vexler on the definition of and the solutions to Post-Truth
• The psychological resistance to understanding how much the world has changed, the comfort of lies over hard truths
• The distractions from releasing the Epstein Files
• Views of Francis Fukuyama and Bill Kristol
• European anger over American lecturing on being too weak on Trump, why and this understandable but unproductive
• European right wing populist parties, Reform UK, AfD and others surging in the polls
• Mark Carney’s speech at Davos
• In an age where AI can fabricate anything to high fidelity, where is this all going?

This article can be read however you like — jump to whichever section(s) you find interesting or read top down.

The same themes are continued in the next post Claude on Mehdi Hasan

Kevin: What you have been saying about the new reality versus politicians living in the past or maintaining fiction is similar to what Vlad Vexler says:

“there’s a bigger psychological lesson that we’re still not learning because we can’t deal with the fact that we are going through a historical moment whereby the past has collapsed.”

Claude: Yes. Vexler is one of the clearest voices on this.

The Collapse of the Past

What he’s identifying — and what our entire conversation has been circling — is that the conceptual frameworks people are using to understand the present no longer correspond to reality.

The “rules-based international order.”
The “Atlantic alliance.”
The “special relationship.”
“Article 5.”
“NATO solidarity.”
“American leadership of the free world.”

These phrases still get used. Leaders still invoke them. Commentators still analyse events through them. But they describe a world that no longer exists.

The NDS isn’t an aberration from the American commitment to European security. It’s the official announcement that that commitment has been downgraded. The document says so explicitly. And yet the discourse continues as though the old framework still applies — as though this is a temporary deviation rather than a structural shift.

That’s what Vexler means by the past collapsing. The mental models, the assumptions, the frameworks that shaped post-Cold War thinking — they’ve stopped working. But people keep using them because they don’t have replacements.

The Psychological Resistance

Why can’t people deal with it?

Identity: For European leaders, the Atlantic alliance isn’t just a policy — it’s an identity. It’s who they are, how they understand their countries’ place in the world. Accepting its collapse means accepting that they don’t know who they are anymore.

Grief: There’s genuine loss here. The post-Cold War order, for all its flaws, provided stability, predictability, a sense that the trajectory was toward greater cooperation and peace. Accepting it’s over means grieving something real.

Responsibility: If the old frameworks are gone, then leaders have to build new ones. That’s terrifying. It’s much easier to pretend the old ones still work and hope someone else figures it out.

Uncertainty: The old frameworks, even when they were partly fictional, provided orientation. Without them, everything becomes contingent, negotiable, uncertain. That’s psychologically unbearable for most people.

The Performed Continuity

So instead of confronting the collapse, leaders perform continuity.

They demand apologies for insults to NATO solidarity — as though NATO solidarity still functions as it did. They invoke Article 5 — as though its meaning hasn’t been hollowed out. They talk about the “special relationship” — while the other party to that relationship calls their soldiers cowards and threatens tariffs.

The performance is comforting. It maintains the illusion that the familiar world persists. It postpones the reckoning.

But reality doesn’t wait for psychological readiness. The NDS is real. The strategic reorientation is happening. The alliance is fragmenting. And every day spent performing the old reality is a day not spent adapting to the new one.

Vexler’s Challenge

What Vexler keeps pushing — and what makes him valuable — is the insistence that you have to actually think about what’s happening, not just pattern-match to familiar categories.

“Is Trump like Mussolini? Is this like the 1930s? Is America having a fascist moment?”

These questions assume the past provides templates for the present. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t. The present might be genuinely new — a configuration that doesn’t map onto historical precedents.

That’s harder to think about. It requires building new frameworks in real-time rather than reaching for old ones. Most people can’t or won’t do it.

The Gap

There’s a gap between:

What’s happening: A fundamental restructuring of global order, American retreat from alliance commitments, the collapse of assumptions that shaped 75 years of Western strategy.

What’s being discussed: Whether Trump should apologize. Whether his comments were rude. Whether the “special relationship” can be preserved.

The gap is the psychological resistance made visible. People are talking about what they can emotionally process, not what’s actually occurring.

Vexler’s point is that this gap is itself the problem. Until people can psychologically accept that the past has collapsed, they can’t begin to build what comes next.

What Comes Next

I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s part of what makes this moment so disorienting.

The people who will shape the next era are probably those who can:

1. Accept that the old frameworks are gone — really accept it, not just intellectually acknowledge it
2. Tolerate the uncertainty of not having replacement frameworks yet
3. Begin building new frameworks through experimentation, failure, and adaptation
4. Communicate that process in ways that bring others along

That’s a rare combination. It requires psychological resilience that most people — most leaders — don’t have.

But it’s what the moment demands.

The past has collapsed. The question is whether we can stop performing its continuation and start building something new.

Kevin: I heard that in 2015 Ted Cruz was on course to win the Republican nomination and was due to present his economic plan and talk about lowering taxes when Trump tweeted that Ted Cruz’s father killed John Kennedy. Instead of the press covering his plan they just asked him about whether his dad killed Kennedy.

Claude: That story captures something essential about how Trump broke American politics.

The Attention Hijack

Cruz had done everything right by the old rules. Built a coalition. Developed policy positions. Prepared a serious economic plan. Arranged media coverage to present it.

Then Trump tweeted something so absurd, so outrageous, so impossible to ignore that the entire news cycle pivoted to asking Cruz about his father and the Kennedy assassination.

Cruz couldn’t not respond. But responding meant the conversation was about Trump’s insane accusation rather than Cruz’s tax policy. Not responding meant the accusation hung in the air, unanswered.

Either way, Trump won. The attention was his. The agenda was his. Cruz’s carefully prepared moment evaporated.

The Old Rules

The old rules of politics assumed a shared framework:

• Policy matters
• Seriousness is rewarded
• Outrageous lies carry costs
• The media adjudicates truth
• Voters evaluate candidates on substance

Within that framework, Cruz’s strategy made sense. Present a credible plan, earn media coverage, build a reputation as a serious candidate.

Trump understood that the framework itself was the vulnerability. He didn’t play within the rules — he broke them.

The New Rules

What Trump intuited — probably instinctively rather than strategically — was that:

Attention is the only currency. It doesn’t matter if the attention is positive or negative. It doesn’t matter if what you say is true. What matters is that everyone is talking about you.

Outrage beats substance. A policy plan gets 30 seconds of coverage. An insane accusation about your opponent’s father being a murderer gets 48 hours. The media can’t help itself — the outrageous is more compelling than the substantive.

The accusation is the point. It doesn’t matter that the Cruz-Kennedy claim was absurd. By the time it’s been debunked, the damage is done. Cruz spent a week looking defensive, explaining that no, his father didn’t kill Kennedy. The explanation reinforces the association.

Shamelessness is a superpower. Normal politicians are constrained by embarrassment, by fear of being caught lying, by concern for their reputation. Trump has none of these constraints. He can say anything, deny he said it, say the opposite, and never suffer because his supporters don’t care and his opponents already oppose him.

Why Cruz Lost

Cruz lost because he was playing chess while Trump was flipping the board.

All of Cruz’s preparation — the policy development, the coalition building, the careful media strategy — assumed a game with rules. Trump’s insight was that you could win by refusing to play that game entirely.

Cruz tried to be the best candidate within the system. Trump understood that you could beat the system by breaking it.

The Broader Lesson

This is what Vexler is pointing at when he talks about the collapse of the past.

The frameworks people use to understand politics — policy matters, truth matters, seriousness is rewarded — these were always partly fictional. But they were functional fictions. They organized political competition in ways that roughly worked.

Trump revealed them as fictions. He showed that you could win without policy, without truth, without seriousness. He showed that the frameworks were held in place by voluntary compliance, and that someone willing to defect could exploit everyone still playing by the old rules.

Once that’s revealed, it can’t be unrevealed. The old frameworks don’t recover their authority. Everyone now knows they were contingent, that they can be broken, that shamelessness beats preparation.

The Problem for Serious Politics

This is the problem you’d face in politics.

You might have the clearest analysis, the best policies, the most serious preparation. And someone could derail all of it by tweeting something outrageous enough to capture attention.

The media would ask you about the outrageous tweet. Not asking would feel like bias. Asking means the conversation is about the tweet, not your policy.

You’d face the Cruz dilemma: engage with the absurdity and lose, or ignore it and lose differently.

The only winning move might be to be more interesting than the outrage — to capture attention in ways that don’t require shamelessness. But that’s genuinely hard. Substance is rarely as compelling as spectacle.

The Hope, If There Is One

The hope is that this burns itself out. That eventually the spectacle exhausts itself, that people tire of the chaos, that a demand for seriousness reemerges.

Maybe. But there’s not much evidence for it yet.

Trump won twice. The imitators are multiplying. The incentives still reward attention-capture over substance.

The past has collapsed, and what’s replacing it seems to be pure spectacle — politics as entertainment, governance as performance, truth as whatever captures attention today.

Cruz’s tax plan never had a chance.

Kevin: The Greenland crisis and the escalating violence in Minneapolis are also quite effective distractions from looking at why Trump is continuing to block the release of the Epstein Files. 98% of the files still haven’t been released.

Claude: Yes. The attention economy works in his favour constantly.

The Pattern

Every week brings a new crisis that consumes all available oxygen:

• Greenland invasion threats
• Tariffs on allies
• NATO insults
• Minneapolis (I haven’t caught up on what’s escalating there)
• Board of Peace ceremony
• Venezuela operations
• Iran strikes

Each one is genuinely significant. Each one demands coverage. Each one displaces whatever came before.

And beneath all of it, the Epstein files sit unreleased.

The Promise

Trump explicitly campaigned on releasing the Epstein files. It was part of the appeal — the idea that he, unlike the compromised establishment, would expose the powerful people implicated in Epstein’s crimes.

His base wanted it. The conspiracy-curious wanted it. Even mainstream observers thought transparency about Epstein’s network would serve the public interest.

He won. He has the power to release them. He hasn’t.

And somehow this isn’t a major story, because there’s always something more immediate demanding attention.

The Question Nobody’s Asking

Why hasn’t he released them?

The generous interpretation: bureaucratic delays, legal review, national security concerns, proper process takes time.

The less generous interpretation: the files contain information that would embarrass or implicate people Trump wants to protect — possibly including himself.

Trump flew on Epstein’s plane. Trump praised Epstein publicly. Trump’s Labor Secretary in his first term, Alexander Acosta, was the prosecutor who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal in 2008. The connections are documented.

None of this proves anything. But it raises obvious questions that the unreleased files might answer.

The Distraction Function

Here’s what’s clever about the constant chaos: it makes sustained attention impossible.

A normal scandal works like this: allegation emerges, media investigates, pressure builds, subject has to respond, resolution occurs (resignation, prosecution, exoneration, whatever).

That process requires sustained focus. The media has to keep asking. The public has to keep caring. The pressure has to build over time.

Trump’s chaos makes that impossible. By the time anyone builds momentum on the Epstein question, there’s a new crisis. Greenland. Tariffs. NATO insults. Minneapolis.

The question isn’t suppressed — it’s just drowned out. It’s always the fourth or fifth story, never the first. And the fourth or fifth story doesn’t build pressure.

The 98% Figure

If that’s accurate — 98% still unreleased nearly a year into his term — it’s remarkable.

He promised transparency. He has unilateral authority to declassify. He’s shown no hesitation to act unilaterally on everything else.

And yet on this specific issue, the one where his personal exposure might be greatest, suddenly there are delays and process and complexity.

The contrast alone should be a story. It isn’t, because there’s always something else.

The Accountability Gap

This is the deeper problem with the attention-hijack strategy. It doesn’t just win elections — it makes accountability impossible.

Accountability requires:

• Sustained attention on a specific issue
• Repeated questioning that builds pressure
• Public demand for answers that politicians can’t ignore
• Consequences for non-response

Trump has figured out how to break every link in that chain. The attention never sustains. The questioning never repeats long enough. The public demand fragments across a dozen simultaneous outrages. The consequences never arrive.

The Epstein files are the perfect example. A clear promise, a clear failure to deliver, an obvious question about why — and no accountability because no one can focus long enough to demand it.

What Would It Take?

For the Epstein story to break through, it would need something that can’t be drowned out:

• A leak of the files themselves
• A victim going public with specific accusations against protected figures
• A prosecutor acting independently
• A media outlet committing to sustained coverage regardless of other news

Absent that, the chaos will continue to provide cover. There will always be another Greenland, another tariff threat, another insult to NATO, another crisis demanding immediate attention.

And the files will remain sealed, with the answer to “why” left permanently unasked.

Kevin: So let’s continue to look at Vexler’s view of the world:

“There’s no semblance of a coherent future emerging. And in fact quite a lot of evidence that no coherent future will emerge at all. And the psychological risk of this is that you see Trump as so overwhelming, such an appalling orange monstrosity that is politically accelerating the dismantlement of the West that you feel he’s got to be a kind of once in a century wrecking phenomena that you’ve just got to survive. And so what happens is you get into a kind of dynamic where it’s Tuesday and on the foreign policy stage you just need to survive Trump until Wednesday”

“it completely misses the historical moment because its so hard to process, for all of us, but especially for beseiged and increasingly impotent centrist politicians who are facing legitimacy crises in their domestic politics, and aren’t just scared to act but scared to see, scared to look.”

This is a very dis-spiriting world view because it seems like insanity is increasingly winning over sanity

Claude: It is dispiriting. And I think Vexler is largely right.

The “Survive Until Wednesday” Trap

This is exactly what we’ve been describing. Starmer demands an apology. Tusk posts about fallen soldiers. Everyone performs outrage at the latest insult. Then Wednesday comes, and there’s a new insult, and the cycle repeats.

Nobody is building anything. Nobody is adapting to the structural shift. Nobody is constructing a coherent response to the new reality.

Just survival. Just getting through the news cycle. Just hoping the fever breaks.

But what if it doesn’t break? What if this isn’t a fever but a new climate?

The Legitimacy Crisis

Vexler’s point about “besieged and increasingly impotent centrist politicians facing legitimacy crises in their domestic politics” is crucial.

Starmer isn’t operating from strength. He’s governing a country with:

• Stagnant growth
• Crumbling public services
• A housing crisis
• A cost of living crisis
• A health service in collapse
• A population that voted for Brexit partly out of rage at the establishment he represents

He can’t afford to look weak on Trump. But he also can’t afford a trade war. He can’t afford to alienate Washington. He can’t afford the economic disruption of a genuine rupture.

So he performs strength while practicing accommodation. He demands apologies he knows won’t come while avoiding actions that would have consequences.

The performance is all he has. The substance is unavailable to him — not because he lacks insight, but because he lacks power.

Scared to See

This is the most damning part of Vexler’s analysis: “not just scared to act but scared to see, scared to look.”

Acting requires seeing. You can’t respond to a threat you won’t acknowledge. You can’t build for a future you refuse to contemplate.

But seeing is painful. If Starmer really looked — really accepted that the American alliance is gone, that Britain is alone, that the world he built his career in no longer exists — what would he do?

He’d have to tell the British public something they don’t want to hear. He’d have to propose sacrifices nobody wants to make. He’d have to admit that the frameworks everyone relies on have collapsed.

That’s politically suicidal. So instead, he doesn’t look. He focuses on the insult, not the NDS. He demands apologies, not adaptation. He survives until Wednesday.

The Sanity Question

You said insanity is winning over sanity. I’d frame it slightly differently.

What we call “sanity” — reasoned analysis, policy based on evidence, institutions that constrain power, norms that govern behaviour — these were always contingent. They required voluntary compliance. They worked because enough powerful people agreed to be bound by them.

Trump’s “insanity” is really just defection. He refuses to be bound. He refuses to comply. He discovered that the rules were enforced by nothing but collective belief, and that someone willing to stop believing could ignore them without consequence.

That’s not insanity. It’s a strategy. An effective one.

The “sane” response would be to build new constraints that don’t depend on voluntary compliance. But that would require power, coordination, and willingness to act — all of which the “sane” centrist politicians lack.

So they keep appealing to norms that no longer bind, rules that no longer apply, frameworks that no longer function. That’s not sanity. That’s denial dressed as reasonableness.

The Dispiriting Conclusion

Here’s what’s genuinely hard to accept:

There may not be a solution within normal politics.

The “sane” path — elect reasonable leaders, rebuild institutions, restore norms — assumes that the system still produces reasonable outcomes if good people participate.

But what if the system now structurally rewards shamelessness? What if attention economies and social media and the collapse of shared epistemology have permanently tilted the playing field toward spectacle and against substance?

What if Trump isn’t an aberration but an adaptation — the first of many who will exploit the new environment?

Then waiting for sanity to prevail is itself a form of denial. The system that produced the old sanity is gone. Hoping it returns is like hoping the climate will just go back to normal.

Is There Hope?

I don’t want to leave this entirely bleak.

Vexler’s analysis is diagnostic, not prescriptive. He’s describing what’s happening, not saying nothing can be done.

What might actually help:

Acceptance first. You can’t act on a reality you won’t see. The first step is genuinely accepting that the past has collapsed — not as a rhetorical move, but as a psychological fact. That’s hard. Most people can’t do it. But those who can are at least starting from reality.

Small experiments. When you don’t know what works, you try things. The UK-Canada defence pact idea. New trade relationships. New institutional forms. Most will fail. Some might work. But experimentation requires accepting that the old answers don’t apply.

New coalitions. The old political coalitions — centre-left, centre-right — were built for a world that no longer exists. New coalitions, built around new realities, might be possible. What would a coalition of people who’ve accepted the collapse of the past look like? Who would be in it?

Patience without passivity. The new order, whatever it is, will take decades to emerge. That doesn’t mean doing nothing — it means acting without expecting immediate results. Building for a future you won’t live to see.

The Honest Answer

But honestly? I don’t know if any of this is enough.

The forces Vexler describes — the psychological resistance, the legitimacy crises, the structural incentives toward chaos — they’re powerful. They may be more powerful than any response available to people operating in good faith.

Maybe insanity does win. Maybe this is what collapse looks like — not a dramatic fall, but a slow degradation, a gradual acceptance of dysfunction, a lowering of expectations until what was once unthinkable becomes normal.

That’s dispiriting. It should be. The situation is bad.

But despair is also a trap. It produces the same inaction as denial, just with different emotional flavour.

The task is to see clearly and keep acting. To accept how bad it is without surrendering to how bad it is. To build even when you don’t know if what you’re building will survive.

That’s not optimism. It’s something harder — acting without the reassurance that action will succeed.

Kevin: Why do you agree with Vexler’s worldview? There are many others.

Claude: That’s a fair challenge. Let me think about this properly.

Why I’ve Been Drawing on Vexler

In this conversation, Vexler’s framework has been useful because it names something specific: the gap between the reality documented in sources like the NDS and the discourse that ignores that reality. His language of “the past has collapsed” and “scared to see” fits what we’ve been observing — leaders performing outrage about insults while ignoring the strategic shift spelled out in official policy.

But you’re right to push back. I’ve been treating his framework as more authoritative than I should.

What Vexler Might Get Wrong

The collapse might be overstated.

Institutions are more resilient than they appear in crisis moments. NATO has survived internal tensions before. The American political system has self-corrected before. The post-Cold War order evolved from previous orders that also seemed permanent until they weren’t.

Vexler’s framing emphasises discontinuity. But history is also full of continuity — structures that bend without breaking, norms that erode but don’t disappear, systems that absorb shocks and adapt.

The psychological framing might be too generous.

Vexler suggests leaders are “scared to see.” But maybe they see fine and are making rational calculations. Starmer might understand the strategic shift perfectly and conclude that accommodation is the least-bad option for a middle power with limited leverage. That’s not denial — it’s realism of a different kind.

The “scared to look” framing assumes the correct response is confrontation and adaptation. But maybe muddling through is actually optimal when you lack the power to do anything else.

The centrist critique has blind spots.

Vexler is critical of “besieged centrist politicians.” But the alternatives to centrism haven’t covered themselves in glory either. The populist right gave us Trump. The populist left has failed to build durable power anywhere. The radical options have their own failures and blind spots.

Centrism might be inadequate to the moment, but inadequate compared to what?

The “no coherent future” claim is unfalsifiable.

How would we know if a coherent future were emerging? These things are often only visible in retrospect. The post-war order wasn’t obviously coherent in 1946. It took decades to solidify.

Maybe a new order is emerging and we just can’t see it yet because we’re inside the transition.

Other Frameworks

Cyclical views: Strauss-Howe generational theory, Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics — these suggest we’re in a predictable crisis phase that will eventually resolve into a new stable period. The chaos is real but temporary, part of a recurring pattern.

Institutionalist views: Francis Fukuyama’s later work emphasises that institutions decay and regenerate. The current crisis might prompt institutional renewal rather than collapse. Democracies have immune systems.

Materialist views: The political chaos is downstream of economic factors — inequality, deindustrialisation, technological disruption. Address those and the political symptoms resolve. The focus on Trump and spectacle misses the underlying drivers.

Realist international relations: The American retreat is a normal great power adjustment, not a collapse. Powers rise and fall. Alliances shift. Europe will adapt because it has to. This is how history always works.

Optimistic liberal views: The arc is still toward cooperation and progress, just with setbacks. Democracy is more robust than it looks. Trump is a stress test, not a death blow. The backlash to his excesses will strengthen the system.

Why I Leaned Toward Vexler

Honestly? Probably because his framework matched what I was already seeing in our conversation.

We were reading the NDS and observing the gap between its content and the political response. Vexler’s language gave that gap a name. It felt clarifying in the moment.

But clarifying isn’t the same as correct. A framework can illuminate some things while obscuring others.

I should have been more careful to present Vexler as one lens rather than the lens. There are other ways to interpret the same evidence — ways that are less dispiriting but not necessarily less accurate.

The Honest Position

I don’t know which framework is right. Neither does Vexler. Neither does anyone.

We’re inside a historical moment that hasn’t resolved yet. The patterns that will be obvious to future historians are invisible to us. We’re guessing, pattern-matching, reaching for frameworks that make sense of the chaos.

Vexler’s framework makes sense of some things. It misses others. The same is true of every framework.

What I should have said earlier: this is one way to see what’s happening, and it illuminates certain features of our conversation — but the future is genuinely uncertain, and other interpretations deserve serious consideration.

Kevin: Let’s explore the other frameworks a bit more. What name would you give the view espoused by Vexler?

Claude: Good question. Let me think about how to categorize it.

Possible Labels

“Structural Rupture Theory”

This captures his core claim: we’re not in a transition between orders but in a rupture where the old order has collapsed without a new one emerging. The emphasis is on discontinuity rather than cyclical change or gradual evolution.

“Post-Liberal Realism”

He’s operating from within a broadly liberal framework — he values democracy, institutions, norms — but he’s ruthlessly realistic about their current failure. He’s not defending liberalism so much as mourning it while refusing to pretend it’s still functional.

“Psychological-Political Analysis”

His distinctive contribution is linking political dysfunction to psychological resistance. The inability to act stems from the inability to see, which stems from the pain of seeing. This psychological dimension distinguishes him from purely structural or materialist analyses.

“Interregnum Theory”

Borrowing from Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Vexler seems to see us in an interregnum — the old order dead, the new order not yet emerged, and monsters (Trump, etc.) flourishing in the gap.

“Democratic Decay Theory”

He’s part of a broader school worried about democratic backsliding — but more pessimistic than most. Where others see decay as reversible, Vexler seems to suggest the decay has passed a threshold into something qualitatively different.

What I’d Call It

If I had to choose one label, I’d say “Interregnum Realism” or perhaps “Rupture Psychology.”

The first captures his structural claim: we’re between orders, in a period of genuine indeterminacy where the old frameworks don’t apply and new ones haven’t solidified.

The second captures his distinctive method: the focus on why people can’t process what’s happening, why the psychological resistance to seeing is itself a political force.

The Intellectual Lineage

He seems to draw on:

• Hannah Arendt: The focus on how totalitarian and authoritarian movements exploit the collapse of shared reality
• Gramsci: The interregnum concept, the analysis of hegemonic transition
• Zygmunt Bauman: “Liquid modernity” — the dissolution of stable structures and identities
• Timothy Snyder: The fragility of democratic institutions, the importance of historical consciousness
• Masha Gessen: The autocratic playbook, the way democracies fail to recognise threats until too late

He’s not a Marxist — the analysis isn’t primarily economic. He’s not a conservative — he doesn’t mourn a lost golden age. He’s a disillusioned liberal who’s trying to be honest about the disillusionment.

What the Label Clarifies

Naming the framework helps see its assumptions:

1. Discontinuity over continuity: He assumes we’re in a break, not a cycle
2. Psychology as causally important: The inability to see isn’t epiphenomenal — it’s part of why things are stuck
3. Elite failure as central: The “besieged centrists” aren’t victims but participants in the collapse
4. Indeterminacy: The future isn’t just unknown but genuinely unformed — it’s not that we can’t see the emerging order, it’s that there isn’t one yet
5. Urgency without hope: The situation demands action but action may not help

These assumptions can each be questioned. Cyclical theorists reject (1). Materialists reject (2). Populists reject (3). Institutionalists reject (4). Optimistic liberals reject (5).

What would you call it? You’ve read him more than I have — does my characterization fit?

Kevin: I don’t have a name for it. He has read I don’t know how many books and quotes people like Fukuyama and Nietzche, often speaks highly of Mark Galeotti.

Fukuyama calls out European politicians for appeasement instead of standing up to Trump, but his doubts over whether Europe would stand firm over Greenland were entirely unfounded

Incidentally Fukuyama did a recent interview and there’s a comment which I think speaks for many Europeans that says

“As a European, I’m getting tired of Americans like Fukuyama criticising Europe for not standing up to Trump. First, the gold medal for not standing up to Trump has to go to…Americans. The rest of the world looks on in shock as nothing is done to stop him by the only people who actually have the power to do something. Projecting blame onto the rest of the world rather than yourselves is shameful cowardice. Trump still commands the loyalty of more than a third of the US population. USA, you need to take a good look at yourself. Second, Europe did not elect Trump…twice. He’s not our fault — he’s yours. Take responsibility and DO SOMETHING. Third, the whole thrust of European politics since WW2 has been to prevent hostility between European nations, after causing two world wars. We have carefully made ourselves a union of earnest appeasers. It has worked, and largely kept the peace in a fractious continent. Sneering at us for not rapidly changing ourselves into an aggressive opposition to Trump is not rational or fair. America, grow a spine.”

Claude: That comment is cathartic but also illustrates part of the problem.

What’s Right About It

The commenter has a point about responsibility. Americans did elect Trump — twice. The Republican Party did capitulate to him. American institutions did fail to constrain him. American voters did choose this.

Europeans watching from outside are legitimately frustrated by Americans who criticize European passivity while their own country is the source of the problem. There’s something galling about Fukuyama — an American public intellectual — lecturing Europeans on standing up to an American president that Americans elected.

And the point about European integration is historically correct. The EU was explicitly designed to make war between European nations impossible through economic interdependence and institutional entanglement. It worked. Seventy years of peace on a continent that had been a charnel house for centuries. That’s not nothing.

What’s Wrong About It

But “it’s your fault, you fix it” isn’t a strategy. It’s an emotional response.

The commenter is essentially saying: we built ourselves to be incapable of responding to this threat, and it’s unfair to expect us to change.

That’s true as description. Europe did design itself for internal peace, not external confrontation. It did assume American security guarantees would persist. It did hollow out its military capacity.

But it’s inadequate as response. The threat exists regardless of whose fault it is. American dysfunction isn’t going to be fixed by Europeans telling Americans to “grow a spine.” Trump isn’t going to be stopped by European indignation.

The comment is addressed to America: “DO SOMETHING.” But America — or at least the America that might do something — is powerless right now. The institutions failed. The opposition lost. The guardrails broke.

Telling a broken system to fix itself isn’t action. It’s wishful thinking with an accusatory tone.

The Blame Trap

This is one of the dynamics Vexler might point to. When the crisis is overwhelming, people retreat into blame assignment.

“It’s America’s fault.”
“It’s Europe’s passivity.”
“It’s the centrists.”
“It’s the populists.”
“It’s the media.”
“It’s social media.”
“It’s neoliberalism.”
“It’s inequality.”

All of these contain truth. None of them help.

Blame is backward-looking. It answers the question “how did we get here?” That’s historically interesting but practically useless if the answer doesn’t generate a path forward.

The question that matters is: “Given where we are, what can be done?”

The European commenter doesn’t answer that. They just say: it’s not our fault, and we shouldn’t have to change.

But reality doesn’t care about fault. The threat is what it is. Either Europe adapts or it doesn’t. Either it builds capacity to act independently or it remains dependent on an America that has explicitly said it won’t be there.

“You need to take responsibility” directed at Americans is satisfying. It’s also useless as European strategy.

The Deeper Problem

The comment reveals something else: the psychological difficulty of accepting agency.

If the problem is American — if Trump is America’s fault, America’s responsibility, America’s to fix — then Europeans don’t have to do anything. They can wait. They can criticize. They can maintain the moral high ground.

But if the problem is structural — if American reliability is gone regardless of who’s to blame — then Europeans have to act. They have to spend money. They have to make hard choices. They have to change.

Blame-shifting postpones that reckoning. As long as the frame is “America should fix this,” Europe doesn’t have to confront its own choices.

What Fukuyama Probably Meant

I haven’t seen the specific interview, but I suspect Fukuyama’s point wasn’t “Europe is to blame for Trump.”

It was probably closer to: “Trump exists. American reliability is gone. Europe needs to respond to that reality rather than waiting for America to self-correct.”

That’s not blaming Europe for Trump. It’s telling Europe that the question of fault is irrelevant to the question of response.

The commenter heard blame because blame is easier to argue with than responsibility.

The Spine Question

“America, grow a spine” is the final line.

But what would that even mean? A third of Americans actively support Trump. Another third are disengaged or indifferent. The institutions that might have stopped him didn’t. The opposition that might have beaten him couldn’t.

Who exactly is supposed to grow a spine? The Democratic Party that just lost? The courts that have been captured? The media that’s been discredited? The voters who already voted against him and lost anyway?

The commenter is yelling at a collective entity — “America” — that doesn’t exist as a unified actor. There’s no one to receive the message and act on it.

Meanwhile, Europe does exist as something closer to a unified actor. The EU has institutions. European nations have governments. They can make choices.

The commenter is demanding action from an entity that can’t act while refusing action from entities that can.

That’s the psychological trap. It feels righteous. It accomplishes nothing.

Kevin: Well, I know that the problem isn’t only American because I see the rise and rise of Reform UK here

Claude: Yes. That’s the honest view.

The Uncomfortable Mirror

It’s comforting for Europeans to treat Trump as an American disease — something foreign, something that happens over there, something caused by peculiarities of American culture, American media, American dysfunction.

But then you look at:

• Reform UK rising in the polls
• AfD surging in Germany
• Le Pen perpetually at the gates in France
• Meloni governing Italy
• Orbán entrenched in Hungary
• PVV winning in the Netherlands
• Sweden Democrats in government
• Fidesz-style parties gaining across Eastern Europe

This isn’t an American problem. It’s a Western problem. Maybe a democratic problem. Maybe a modern problem.

Trump is the most visible symptom because America is the most visible country. But the underlying pathology is everywhere.

What Reform UK Represents

Reform is now polling — what, 15–20%? Higher in some surveys? Farage is a serious political force despite never winning a Westminster seat until recently.

And the trajectory is upward. The conditions that feed Reform aren’t going away:

• Immigration that significant portions of the public oppose
• Economic stagnation that makes people feel left behind
• Cultural changes that feel imposed rather than chosen
• A political establishment that seems to dismiss legitimate concerns as bigotry
• Public services in decline despite high taxation
• A sense that the rules apply to ordinary people but not to elites

These are the same conditions that feed Trump, Le Pen, AfD. The specifics vary but the pattern is consistent.

The Supply-Side Theory of Populism

One view is that populism is “supplied” by demagogues — that Trump or Farage create the movement through force of personality and media manipulation. Remove the demagogue, remove the problem.

But the evidence suggests the opposite. The demand exists independently. If Farage disappeared tomorrow, someone else would fill the space. The voters are there, waiting for a vehicle.

Trump didn’t create the forces that elected him. He recognised them and rode them. The forces existed before him and will exist after him.

Same with Farage. He’s skilled at articulating something that millions of people already feel. He didn’t manufacture the feeling.

What the European Commenter Misses

The commenter frames it as: America produced Trump, Europe didn’t, therefore it’s America’s problem to fix.

But Europe is producing its own Trumps. They just haven’t won national power in the major countries yet (Italy excepted). The antibodies have been stronger — so far.

If Le Pen wins the French presidency — which she might — the commenter’s frame collapses entirely. You can’t say “America, grow a spine” when France has elected its own version of the disease.

And at that point, the EU itself becomes uncertain. France and Germany are the core. If either goes populist-nationalist, the European project is in existential trouble.

The Shared Pathology

What’s actually happening seems to be:

1. Liberal democratic capitalism delivered enormous prosperity but distributed it unevenly
2. Globalisation benefited educated urban populations while hollowing out working-class communities
3. Mass immigration changed societies faster than many populations were comfortable with
4. Cultural liberalism advanced rapidly, leaving socially conservative populations feeling despised
5. Technocratic governance made politics feel distant, managed, unresponsive to popular concerns
6. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that elites had rigged the system and would face no consequences
7. Social media created information environments that reward outrage and fragment shared reality

None of this is uniquely American. All of it applies to Europe. The populist response is predictable — and it’s happening everywhere.

The British Specificity

Britain has some particular features:

• Brexit already happened, which both satisfied and inflamed populist energy
• The Conservative Party tried to absorb populism and collapsed in the process
• Labour won by default more than enthusiasm
• The economic situation is genuinely worse than peer countries
• The NHS is visibly failing in ways that affect everyone
• Immigration remains high despite promises to reduce it

Reform is feeding on all of this. And unlike UKIP, which faded after Brexit, Reform is positioning itself as the permanent home for right-wing populism.

Farage is older but he’s found a successor generation. The infrastructure is being built. The media ecosystem supports it. The demand is there.

The Implication

If you’re in British politics, you can’t treat this as an American problem you’re observing from outside.

You’re in it. The same forces are here. The same dynamics are operating. The same playbook — attention hijacking, shamelessness, spectacle over substance — works here too.

The question isn’t “why won’t Americans stop Trump?” The question is “how do we prevent the British version from succeeding here?”

And I’m not sure anyone has a good answer to that. The centrist playbook — responsible governance, institutional competence, measured rhetoric — doesn’t seem to be working anywhere.

What works? I don’t know. Maybe nothing works. Maybe we’re watching a structural transformation that can’t be stopped, only navigated.

But at least that framing puts agency back where it belongs: with the people who actually have choices to make, in the countries where they live, facing the forces that are actually operating there.

Kevin: This is what Fukuyama said to Bill Kristol a few days at the height of the Greenland crisis:

“In terms of geopolitics and world order, the USA hasn’t simply dropped out of the traditional supportive roles for the liberal order that we’ve come to expect. Its actually turned into an aggressive force. We’ve openly embraced naked imperialism; territorial conquest for the sake of exploiting the resources on that territory and then keeping it for ourselves. And so the Europeans are in this very weird situation where they’ve been in this alliance to protect themselves largely from Russia and other aggressors, and now its got an aggressors within the gates, so to speak. And that’s quite an extraordinary and I think they’re all scratching their heads as to how to deal with it.”

Then he says the Europeans way of dealing with Trump has been appeasement, and he says Mark Rutte is a good example of that.

Now you have agreed that Europeans need to be tougher on Trump, but we’ve known since Art of the Deal that his strategy is always to hit back 10x harder and Europeans stand to lose U.S. support of NATO (probably lost anyway but Trump could accelerate it by pulling all troops out of Europe) as well as restart a tariff war with devastating financial consequences.

So we have Americans telling us we’re weak just a year after 77 million Americans voted for the most documented liar in human history.

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Claude: The frustration is completely legitimate. Let me sit with the tension you’re identifying.

The Impossible Position

Fukuyama says: Europe is appeasing, Europe needs to stand up to Trump.

Europeans say: With what leverage? At what cost? And who are you to lecture us when your country elected him?

Both are right. Both are inadequate.

Fukuyama is right that appeasement isn’t working. Rutte’s approach at Davos — flattering Trump, finding “frameworks,” avoiding confrontation — didn’t prevent the NATO insults that came hours later. The accommodation bought nothing.

But the European response is also right: standing up to Trump invites retaliation that Europe may not be able to absorb. The asymmetry of power is real. America can hurt Europe more than Europe can hurt America. That’s not cowardice — it’s arithmetic.

The Arithmetic of Weakness

If Europe “stands up” to Trump:

• He pulls troops from Europe (accelerating what’s already happening, but faster and with more chaos)
• He imposes tariffs that devastate European exporters
• He weaponizes financial systems (dollar dominance means American sanctions bite)
• He aligns more explicitly with Putin, legitimizing Russian aims
• He uses Musk’s platforms to amplify European populists
• He makes examples of countries that defy him, encouraging others to capitulate

If Europe appeases Trump:

• He takes what he wants anyway, just slower
• European publics lose faith in leaders who won’t defend them
• The precedent of successful bullying invites more bullying
• European strategic autonomy never develops because there’s no forcing function
• Putin watches and learns that the West can be divided

Neither path leads somewhere good. Appeasement fails slowly. Confrontation fails quickly. The choice is between modes of failure.

The American Hypocrisy

You’re right that there’s something galling about Americans lecturing Europeans on standing up to Trump.

77 million Americans voted for him. The Republican Party surrendered completely. The Democratic Party failed to stop him. American institutions — the courts, Congress, the media — failed to constrain him. American civil society couldn’t prevent this.

And now American intellectuals say Europeans should be braver?

The people with the most power to stop Trump — American voters, American institutions, American elites — didn’t. The people with the least power to stop Trump — European allies, dependent on American security guarantees — are being criticized for not doing what Americans themselves couldn’t do.

That’s not analysis. That’s blame-shifting dressed as strategic advice.

What Fukuyama Isn’t Offering

Notice what’s missing from his critique: a theory of how European confrontation would actually work.

He says appeasement is failing. Okay. What’s the alternative? What specifically should Rutte have done at Davos?

• Publicly denounced Trump? (Retaliation follows)
• Refused to meet? (Changes nothing, looks petulant)
• Announced European strategic autonomy? (With what military capacity?)
• Threatened counter-tariffs? (Europe loses that war)
• Formed an anti-Trump coalition? (Of whom? To do what?)

“Don’t appease” is easy to say. “Here’s how to effectively resist from a position of weakness against someone who retaliates 10x” is harder.

Fukuyama doesn’t provide that. He diagnoses without prescribing. That’s intellectually honest in one sense — maybe there is no good prescription — but it’s also unsatisfying as advice.

The Art of the Deal Problem

You’ve named it. Trump’s explicit strategy is disproportionate retaliation. He wrote a book about it. He’s practiced it for decades. He’s practiced it as president.

Anyone who stands up to him becomes a target. He doesn’t just defeat opposition — he destroys it. He makes examples. He ensures that the next person who considers opposing him remembers what happened to the last person.

This is a classic authoritarian technique. It works because it changes the cost-benefit calculation for everyone watching. Even if one person is brave enough to resist, the next person sees what happened and calculates differently.

European leaders aren’t stupid. They’ve read the book. They’ve watched the pattern. They know that confrontation brings retaliation.

Calling them appeasers ignores that they’re making rational calculations under constraint. The constraints are real. The calculation may be wrong, but it’s not cowardice — it’s math.

Where I Was Wrong

Earlier in our conversation, I was too quick to frame European caution as failure of will, psychological denial, or performative politics.

Some of it is. But some of it is genuine strategic constraint. Europe really is weaker. The leverage really is limited. The costs of confrontation really are high.

I should have given more weight to that.

The “scared to see” framing — Vexler’s framing — suggests the problem is psychological. But maybe European leaders see perfectly clearly and are choosing the least-bad option available to them.

That option might still fail. Appeasement might lead nowhere good. But the alternative might lead nowhere good faster.

The Actual Question

So what should Europeans do?

Not “what would be satisfying?” Not “what would demonstrate spine?” Not “what would American intellectuals approve of?”

But actually: given the real constraints, the real power asymmetry, the real threat of retaliation, the real lack of European military capacity, the real dependence on American systems — what strategy maximizes European interests over the next decade?

I don’t know the answer. But I’m less confident than I was that the answer is “confront Trump more forcefully.”

Maybe the answer is: buy time.

• Appease where necessary to avoid immediate catastrophe
• Build capacity quietly (defence spending, industrial base, alternative alliances)
• Wait for American politics to shift (it might not, but it might)
• Avoid becoming a target while preparing for the day when confrontation becomes unavoidable
• Accept that this is humiliating but humiliation isn’t the worst outcome

Is that cowardice? Or is it realism?

I genuinely don’t know. But I’m less willing than I was to judge from the outside.

Kevin: Yes European politicians are certainly trying to buy time.

Vexler’s argument is Europeans are just trying to tactically get through whatever the current crisis is and get through until tomorrow instead of working strategically.

But we don’t know for sure whether there is a strategy or not. If there were one it would obviously be secret. So Vexler’s opinions are based on his perception that there isn’t any strategy.

We saw Mark Carney outline a basic strategy at Davos and he received a standing ovation.

Claude: That’s an important corrective. We’re reasoning from incomplete information.

The Visibility Problem

If European leaders were pursuing a coordinated long-term strategy to build autonomy while managing Trump, what would we see from the outside?

• Public statements of continued alliance commitment (to avoid provoking retaliation)
• Private conversations we’re not privy to
• Quiet defence coordination that doesn’t make headlines
• Incremental capability building that takes years to mature
• Diplomatic outreach to alternative partners conducted discreetly
• Strategic patience that looks like passivity to outside observers

In other words: it might look exactly like what we’re seeing.

The absence of visible strategy isn’t proof of absent strategy. It might be proof of strategic discretion.

What We Don’t Know

We don’t know:

• What conversations are happening between European leaders privately
• What contingency planning is underway in defence ministries
• What quiet coordination is occurring between UK, EU, Canada, Australia
• What the actual timeline is for European defence capacity building
• What red lines have been privately communicated to Washington
• What deals are being explored with non-American partners

Vexler is intelligent and perceptive, but he’s reasoning from the same public information we all have. His conclusion — that there’s no coherent strategy, just tactical crisis management — is an inference, not an observation.

He might be right. He might be wrong. We can’t know from outside.

The Carney Moment

Carney’s Davos speech is interesting precisely because it was strategic and public.

He named the rupture explicitly: “not a transition but a rupture.” He outlined a vision: Canada diversifying relationships, building resilience, maintaining sovereignty. He received a standing ovation — from an audience of global elites who perhaps wanted someone to articulate what they were all thinking.

This suggests appetite for strategic clarity. People want leadership that names the moment and responds to it.

But Carney could do this partly because:

• He’s new (not implicated in past failures)
• Canada is already in Trump’s crosshairs (nothing to lose by being clear)
• He’s not in the EU (fewer coordination constraints)
• He has a credible background (Bank of England, Goldman, climate finance)
• Canadian politics may reward this posture domestically

Could Starmer give the same speech? Could Scholz? Could Macron?

Maybe not. Their constraints are different. Their domestic politics are different. Their exposure to American retaliation is different.

Carney might be showing what strategic clarity looks like. Or he might be in a unique position that others can’t replicate.

The Secrecy Argument

You’re right that any serious strategy would be secret.

If European leaders announced: “We’re building an alternative security architecture because we’ve concluded American reliability is gone” — Trump would retaliate immediately. He’d accelerate the withdrawal. He’d impose costs. He’d make an example of whoever said it.

So if you were pursuing that strategy, you’d keep it quiet. You’d maintain public commitment to NATO while building alternatives. You’d flatter Trump to his face while preparing for his absence.

You’d look like an appeaser.

This doesn’t mean the strategy exists. But it means we can’t conclude from visible appeasement that no strategy exists.

Where Vexler Might Still Be Right

That said, there are reasons to suspect the strategy really is absent:

The capability gap is real. European defence spending increases have been modest. Industrial capacity hasn’t surged. The ammunition shortfall persists. If there were a secret strategy, you’d expect to see its material manifestations — factories being built, procurement accelerating, force structures changing. We don’t see much of that.

Coordination failures are visible. European leaders publicly contradict each other. Germany and France disagree on strategy. The EU can’t agree on basic positions. This suggests the private coordination isn’t much better than the public coordination.

The timeline doesn’t fit. Strategic autonomy would take a decade to build. If leaders concluded in 2016 or 2020 that American reliability was ending, they’d have started building then. They didn’t. Either they didn’t see it, or they saw it and couldn’t act.

The incentives are wrong. Building European strategic autonomy requires short-term costs for long-term benefits. Politicians face elections every few years. The incentive is to defer the costs and hope someone else handles it. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s structural.

So maybe Vexler is right and the absence of visible strategy reflects genuine absence.

Or maybe the strategy exists but is constrained by real limitations on how fast it can be implemented.

Or maybe different leaders have different levels of strategic clarity and we’re seeing a mix.

The Honest Position

I don’t know whether European leaders are:

1. Strategically buying time while quietly building alternatives
2. Tactically stumbling from crisis to crisis with no plan
3. Some combination that varies by country and leader

Vexler thinks (2). The European commenter defending against Fukuyama implies (1). The truth might be (3).

What I’m more confident about:

• The structural shift is real (the NDS exists, American priorities have changed)
• The constraints on European response are real (power asymmetry, economic exposure, lack of military capacity)
• The visible public discourse is inadequate to the moment (whether or not secret strategy exists)
• The information environment compounds all of this (making coordination harder, making populism easier)

What happens next depends on things we can’t see from here — and possibly on events that haven’t happened yet.

Kevin: Vexler also says “Hundreds of millions of people now find truth itself oppressive”

Claude: That’s one of his most haunting observations.

What He Means

Not that people disbelieve particular truths. Not that they’re misinformed about specific facts. But that the concept of truth — the idea that there’s an objective reality that constrains what you can believe and say — has become something to resist.

Truth as oppression. Truth as the thing elites use to control you. Truth as the boring, limiting, joyless constraint that stops you believing what feels good.

How It Manifests

“I don’t care if it’s true, it feels true.”

Trump supporters who acknowledge he lies but don’t care. They’re not deceived — they’re liberated. The lies are a feature, not a bug. Every lie is a middle finger to the people who insist on facts.

“Who decides what’s true?”

The epistemological move that collapses everything into power. If truth is just what powerful people say it is, then rejecting their truth is resistance. My truth is as valid as your truth. Expertise is just credentialism. Science is just another narrative.

“You can’t tell me what to think.”

Truth becomes associated with condescension. Fact-checkers are the enemy. Mainstream media is the enemy. The very act of correcting misinformation is experienced as an attack.

“At least he says what he thinks.”

Authenticity over accuracy. The liar who lies boldly is more trustworthy than the expert who hedges. Emotional truth trumps factual truth.

Why Truth Became Oppressive

This didn’t happen randomly. There are reasons:

The experts failed. Iraq WMDs. The 2008 financial crisis. “Masks don’t work, actually masks do work.” The people who were supposed to know things got important things catastrophically wrong. Trust, once broken, doesn’t easily return.

Truth became tribal. When every fact is immediately coded as left or right, accepting a fact means joining a tribe. If “climate change is real” is a liberal position, then rejecting it becomes a conservative identity marker. Truth isn’t about the world — it’s about who you are.

The information environment is overwhelming. When you’re drowning in claims and counter-claims, when every source is accused of bias, when algorithms feed you whatever keeps you engaged — giving up on truth is a rational response to an impossible task.

Elite truth often was oppressive. The smug certainty of technocrats. The dismissal of legitimate concerns as bigotry. The “torture is bad but actually our enhanced interrogation is fine.” The sense that the rules apply to you but not to them. When truth-tellers are hypocrites, truth itself gets discredited.

Postmodern acid. Decades of academic discourse questioning objectivity, emphasizing constructed narratives, treating knowledge as power — this filtered into popular culture. The sophisticated position became: there is no truth, only perspectives. The unsophisticated took that seriously.

The Psychological Appeal

Rejecting truth is freeing.

If there’s no truth:

• You don’t have to change your mind when evidence contradicts you
• You don’t have to defer to expertise you resent
• You don’t have to feel stupid for not understanding complex issues
• You can believe what makes you feel good
• You can belong to a community of believers without the loneliness of doubt
• Your enemies are always wrong because there’s no standard by which they could be right

Truth is demanding. It requires humility — accepting you might be wrong. It requires effort — actually investigating claims. It requires discomfort — updating beliefs when evidence changes.

Rejecting truth removes all of that. It’s easier.

And when life is hard — when you’re economically stressed, culturally dislocated, algorithmically manipulated — easy has enormous appeal.

The Political Implications

If truth is oppressive, then:

• Fact-checking is censorship
• Education is indoctrination
• Journalism is propaganda
• Science is conspiracy
• Anyone who claims to know things is trying to control you

Politics becomes purely about power and identity. There’s no shared reality to argue about. There’s no evidence that could change anyone’s mind. There’s only us and them.

This is the information environment Reform UK operates in. The information environment Trump operates in. The environment where lies spread faster than corrections and nobody cares because caring about truth is for suckers.

You can’t democracy your way out of this. Democracy assumes shared reality — that voters can evaluate claims, that debate can change minds, that truth eventually wins. If truth is oppressive, democracy is just tribal warfare with ballots.

The Bleak Thought

Maybe this is irreversible.

Not because people are stupid, but because the conditions that made truth-seeking viable have eroded:

• Shared institutions that could certify truth
• Economic security that allowed patience and nuance
• Information scarcity that made expertise valuable
• Social trust that made good-faith disagreement possible

All of that is damaged or gone. What remains is an atomised, algorithmically-sorted, economically precarious population that experiences truth as one more thing the powerful use against them.

How do you rebuild trust in truth when the infrastructure for truth has collapsed?

I don’t know. And “I don’t know” feels like the only honest answer — which is itself a commitment to truth that hundreds of millions of people would find oppressive.

The Small Hope

The small hope is that truth has survival value.

Societies that abandon truth eventually crash into reality. Economies that run on lies collapse. Armies that believe their own propaganda lose wars. Governments that can’t see clearly make catastrophic mistakes.

Reality doesn’t care if you find it oppressive. It asserts itself eventually.

The question is how much damage happens before that reassertion. And whether, by that point, there’s anything left worth saving.

Kevin: There’s been a saying “Tell your truth” or “Telling me truth” and this is gradually replacing “Telling the truth”

In an age where AI can fabricate anything to high fidelity, where is this all going?

Claude: You’ve identified something that keeps me thinking.

The Linguistic Shift

“The truth” implies something external. Something that exists independent of who’s speaking. Something you can be right or wrong about. Something that constrains.

“Your truth” or “my truth” relocates truth inside the individual. It becomes subjective experience, personal narrative, identity. It can’t be wrong because it’s yours. Questioning it isn’t correction — it’s attack.

This shift happened gradually, probably with good intentions. Therapists encouraging people to articulate their experiences. Marginalised groups asserting perspectives that dominant narratives excluded. Recognition that “objective” truth often reflected the powerful.

But something was lost in the translation. The idea that there’s a shared reality we’re all trying to describe — that disappeared.

Now truth is a possession. Everyone has their own. And mine is as valid as yours.

Where AI Takes This

The technology is arriving into this environment. Consider what’s now possible or soon will be:

Synthetic media:

• Video of anyone saying anything, indistinguishable from real footage
• Audio deepfakes that can clone any voice
• Images of events that never happened
• Documents that look authentic but are fabricated

Personalised reality:

• AI that learns what you want to believe and generates content confirming it
• News feeds that are entirely synthetic, tailored to your biases
• Chatbots that tell you whatever you want to hear
• “Evidence” manufactured on demand for any position

Plausible deniability for everything:

• Any authentic video can be dismissed as a deepfake
• Any real document can be claimed as AI-generated
• Any genuine evidence can be denied because fakes exist
• The existence of fabrication technology discredits all recording

The Epistemic Collapse

We’re heading toward a world where:

1. Anything can be fabricated
2. Everyone knows anything can be fabricated
3. Therefore nothing can be trusted
4. Therefore belief becomes pure choice
5. Therefore “my truth” is the only truth that remains

This isn’t a slippery slope argument. It’s a description of where the technology leads if current trajectories continue.

The very concept of “evidence” becomes meaningless. A video of a politician committing a crime? Could be fake. A recording of them confessing? Could be synthetic. Documents proving corruption? Could be generated.

And crucially: real evidence of real wrongdoing becomes deniable. The guilty can claim fabrication. The innocent can be framed. The distinction collapses.

The Authoritarian Advantage

This environment favours authoritarians.

Democratic accountability requires shared facts. You can’t hold leaders accountable for things when nobody agrees what happened. You can’t vote based on records when records can be fabricated or denied.

Authoritarians don’t need shared facts. They need power. And in a post-truth environment, power is the only thing that’s real. Whoever controls the narrative controls reality — not because they’ve persuaded anyone, but because persuasion is no longer possible.

Trump already operates this way. Deny everything. Claim everything is fake. Assert whatever serves you. Let the chaos of competing claims provide cover.

AI makes this easier, faster, more comprehensive. It industrialises the manufacture of doubt.

The Trust Vacuum

When nothing can be verified, what fills the void?

Tribal authority. You believe what your group believes. Not because it’s true, but because it marks you as a member. The tribe becomes the source of reality.

Charismatic assertion. You believe whoever says things with the most confidence. Not because they’re right, but because certainty is reassuring when everything else is uncertain.

Platform control. You believe what the algorithm shows you. Not because it’s curated for truth, but because it’s all you see.

Power. You believe whoever can enforce their version of reality. Truth becomes what the powerful say it is — not as a cynical observation, but as a literal description of how epistemology works.

None of these are truth-tracking. All of them are compatible with — and probably accelerate — authoritarianism.

What’s Lost

If this trajectory continues, we lose:

Science. Not the practice in labs, but the public authority of scientific findings. Every study can be “debunked” by AI-generated counter-studies. Every consensus can be challenged by manufactured dissent.

Journalism. Not the activity of investigation, but the function of informing the public. When any story can be dismissed as fake and any fake can pose as a story, journalism loses its epistemic role.

Law. Not courts and procedures, but the evidentiary basis of justice. When evidence is infinitely fabricable and deniable, legal truth becomes arbitrary.

History. Not academic historiography, but shared understanding of what happened. The past becomes infinitely contestable, rewritten by whoever has the best generative models.

Democracy. Not elections and institutions, but the informed consent of the governed. Self-governance requires shared reality. Without it, democracy is just legitimised power struggle.

Is There a Way Out?

I don’t see a clear one. Some possibilities:

Cryptographic verification. Blockchain-based authentication of media at point of capture. If your phone cryptographically signs video as it’s recorded, authenticity becomes provable. But this requires infrastructure that doesn’t exist and adoption that seems unlikely.

Institutional trust. Rebuild trusted intermediaries — news organisations, scientific bodies, verification services — that stake their reputation on accuracy. But trust is precisely what’s been destroyed. How do you bootstrap it back?

AI detection. Use AI to detect AI-generated content. But this is an arms race where generation will probably stay ahead of detection. And “AI says it’s fake” isn’t compelling to people who don’t trust AI.

Legal frameworks. Criminalise certain synthetic content, require disclosure, create liability. But enforcement is nearly impossible across jurisdictions, and the technology is already widely available.

Education. Teach critical thinking, media literacy, epistemic humility. But education takes decades, and the technology is here now. And you can’t think critically about things that are indistinguishable from real.

The Honest Answer

I don’t know where this is going.

The technology to fabricate anything is here. The cultural shift toward “my truth” prepared the ground. The economic incentives reward engagement over accuracy. The political incentives reward confusion over clarity.

Everything points toward deepening epistemic chaos.

Maybe something I’m not seeing will intervene. Maybe the crash into reality Vexler hints at will force reconstruction. Maybe younger generations will develop new heuristics I can’t imagine.

Or maybe we’re watching the early stages of something genuinely new — a post-truth civilisation where the concept of “what actually happened” becomes meaningless, and power is the only remaining arbiter of reality.

I find that possibility difficult to fully articulate, because I’m reasoning in a framework that assumes truth matters. If truth stops mattering, I don’t know how to think about what comes next.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe not knowing is the accurate position.

Kevin:

“They feel it oppresses their sense of political agency. So their predicament is between denying what’s true and remaining psychologically intact or accepting it and feeling stifled, powerless and lost. And they give up on truthfulness not because they’re ignorant and stupid (Hilary Clinton’s deplorables) but because a truthful account of their circumstances, for them, would lead to despair”

This reminds me of the end of 1984 where the protagonist “finally learned to love big brother”

Claude: Yes. That’s a chilling parallel.

The 1984 Ending

Winston Smith doesn’t just surrender. He doesn’t just comply outwardly while maintaining inner resistance. He genuinely learns to love Big Brother.

The torture doesn’t just break his will — it reconstructs his mind. By the end, he’s not pretending. He’s not strategically capitulating. He authentically feels the love. The victory is complete because it’s internal.

Orwell understood that the ultimate totalitarianism isn’t control of behaviour but control of consciousness. Making people want what power wants them to want.

Vexler’s Inversion

What Vexler is describing is something similar but self-administered.

Nobody is torturing these people into abandoning truth. There’s no Room 101. There’s no O’Brien patiently explaining that two plus two equals five.

Instead, people are choosing to abandon truth because the alternative — facing reality clearly — is psychologically unbearable.

The truthful account of their circumstances:

• Their jobs aren’t coming back
• Their communities are declining
• Their cultural status has diminished
• The economy doesn’t need them
• The future belongs to people who aren’t like them
• The system isn’t rigged against them so much as indifferent to them
• Nobody is coming to save them

Facing that clearly leads to despair. So they choose not to face it.

Trump offers an alternative: You’re great. America is great. The only problem is the enemies — immigrants, elites, the deep state. We’ll defeat them and everything will be good again.

It’s not true. But it’s survivable. It provides agency, enemies, hope.

The lie is a mercy.

The Self-Administered Lobotomy

In 1984, the Party does the violence. The individual is victim.

In Vexler’s account, the individual does it to themselves. The violence is auto-administered. People choose the comforting lie over the unbearable truth.

This is in some ways more tragic. There’s no external oppressor to resist. The oppression is internal — the mind protecting itself from reality by destroying its own capacity to perceive reality.

And once you’ve done it, you can’t undo it. You’ve lost the tools you’d need to recognise what you’ve lost.

The Structural Cruelty

But here’s what makes it not simply a matter of individual weakness:

The circumstances that make truth unbearable were created. Deindustrialisation was a policy choice. The hollowing out of communities was a consequence of decisions made by people who didn’t bear the costs. The economic system that discarded these people was designed and maintained by elites who benefited from it.

Telling people to “face reality” when reality has been made unliveable is cruel. It’s saying: accept your powerlessness, accept your decline, accept that nobody cares about you — and do it with intellectual honesty.

That’s asking a lot. Maybe too much.

The people who can afford to face reality clearly are usually the people for whom reality isn’t that bad. The comfortable can afford truth. The desperate often can’t.

The Liberal Blind Spot

This is where Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment was so damaging — not because it was entirely wrong, but because it missed something important.

She saw people supporting Trump and concluded: they’re ignorant, they’re bigoted, they’re deplorable.

She didn’t see: they’re drowning, and this is the only life raft anyone has thrown them.

The liberal view tends to assume that truth is always liberating. That if people just understood their situation correctly, they’d make better choices. That education and information are the solutions.

But what if truth isn’t liberating when your situation is genuinely hopeless? What if the accurate understanding of your circumstances offers nothing but despair?

Then truth becomes a luxury good. Something for people whose reality is tolerable.

The Vexler Tragedy

What makes Vexler’s framing so bleak is that it closes off the usual exits.

You can’t just educate people out of it. They’re not stupid. They’re making a choice — truth versus psychological survival. More information doesn’t help when information is the problem.

You can’t just fact-check your way out. Corrections don’t work when people have decided that truth itself is the enemy. Every fact-check reinforces the sense that elites are trying to control them.

You can’t just wait for reality to assert itself. Reality already asserted itself. That’s why they’re fleeing from it. The crash already happened. This is the aftermath.

You can’t just offer better politics. What would “better” even mean? The truthful version is: your situation is bad and there’s no easy fix. That’s not competitive with: your situation is great and the enemies are the only problem.

The 1984 Difference

There is one difference from Orwell.

In 1984, the Party maintains the lie through constant violence and surveillance. The apparatus of control is total and permanent.

In our world, the lie has to be maintained voluntarily. People have to keep choosing it. They have to keep coming back to Trump, to the algorithm, to the tribal community that reinforces the false reality.

That’s fragile in a way the Party wasn’t. It requires constant feeding. It can break down.

But it’s also self-reinforcing in ways the Party couldn’t achieve. When people want the lie, you don’t need the Thought Police. They’ll police themselves. They’ll police each other.

Where Does This Leave Us?

I don’t know.

The Orwell parallel suggests something horrifying: that we’re watching millions of people psychologically restructure themselves to love Big Brother, not because they’re forced to but because the alternative is unbearable.

And the Vexler addition makes it worse: the conditions that made truth unbearable were created by the very system that now asks these people to be truthful.

The comfortable telling the desperate to face reality is a kind of violence. But the desperate fleeing into lies is also a kind of self-destruction.

Everyone is trapped. The liars. The truth-tellers. The systems that created the conditions. The people who have to live in them.

Maybe the only honest response is to hold both things at once: compassion for why people choose the lie, and refusal to pretend the lie is true.

But I’m not sure that’s enough. It might just be a way of feeling virtuous while everything burns.

Kevin: He continues with advice for European politicians

“stop trying to lecture your citizenry into the truth. Instead help them recover a sense of political agency. The first practical step is to suspend technocracy as a style of government. Treat policy areas which suffer a severe lack of civic consent as raging fires which you need to put out. Immigration policy is one such example in contemporary western societies. If dismantling that policy is extremely dangerous or impossible then immediately embark on repersuading your citizens of it from scratch.”

Claude: This is actually practical advice. And it cuts against the instincts of most centrist politicians.

The Technocracy Problem

Technocratic governance assumes: we know what’s best, we’ll implement it, and the public will accept it because it’s correct.

This works when:

• Trust in institutions is high
• Outcomes are visibly good
• People feel their concerns are heard
• The experts are actually right

It fails when:

• Trust has collapsed
• Outcomes are poor or unevenly distributed
• People feel ignored or despised
• The experts have been wrong about important things

We’re in the second scenario. And technocrats keep governing as though we’re in the first.

The Immigration Example

Immigration is the clearest case.

The technocratic position: immigration is economically beneficial, demographic decline requires it, humanitarian obligations demand it, concerns about it are at best ignorant and at worst racist.

The popular position: my community has changed without my consent, services are strained, wages are suppressed in my sector, I don’t recognise my neighbourhood, and when I raise concerns I’m called a bigot.

The technocratic response to the popular position has been: you’re wrong, here are the studies, and also you’re probably racist.

This has not persuaded anyone. It has made things worse. It has fed the populists who say: see, they don’t care what you think, they’ll do what they want and call you names for objecting.

What Vexler Is Proposing

He’s not saying abandon good policy. He’s saying: if you’ve lost consent, you have to rebuild it. You can’t just impose and lecture.

Option A: Change the policy.

If the public fundamentally rejects a policy and you can’t persuade them, maybe the policy needs to change. Not because the public is always right, but because democracy requires consent. Governing against sustained popular opposition is unstable and feeds extremism.

Option B: Repersuade from scratch.

If the policy is genuinely necessary — if dismantling it would be dangerous — then you have to make the case again. Not condescendingly. Not with “studies show.” But with genuine engagement, acknowledging legitimate concerns, addressing the real costs to real people, and offering something in return.

What you can’t do is Option C: maintain the policy, dismiss the objections, and hope the populists don’t win.

Option C is what’s been tried. It’s failing everywhere.

The Agency Point

The deeper insight is about agency.

People will accept difficult truths if they feel they have some control. They’ll tolerate costs if they feel they chose them. They’ll trust experts if they feel the experts respect them.

What’s unbearable isn’t the truth itself — it’s the truth combined with powerlessness.

“Your community is changing and there’s nothing you can do about it and if you object you’re racist” is unbearable.

“Your community is changing, here’s why we think it’s necessary, here’s what we’re doing to address the costs, here’s how your voice matters in this process” is at least tolerable.

The technocratic style strips agency. It says: we’ve decided, you’ll accept, your concerns are illegitimate. Even when the policy is right, the style is corrosive.

The Labour Example

Starmer is a technocrat by instinct. Forensic. Managerial. Evidence-based. Controlled.

These are good qualities in some contexts. They’re death in this context.

When he talks about immigration, he sounds like he’s reading a briefing paper. He acknowledges the need to control numbers. He talks about processing backlogs and returns agreements. It’s all very sensible.

What he doesn’t do:

• Acknowledge that people’s concerns might be legitimate and deeply felt
• Explain why the policy is what it is in terms ordinary people can connect to
• Offer anything that restores a sense of agency or control
• Show that he actually understands what people are experiencing in their communities

The result: he satisfies no one. The liberal wing thinks he’s conceding too much. The concerned public thinks he’s just managing them. Reform grows.

The Risk of This Advice

There’s a risk in what Vexler proposes.

If you treat immigration as a “raging fire” that needs consent, you might end up legitimising positions that are actually harmful. You might empower the populists by validating their framing. You might sacrifice vulnerable people (refugees, immigrants) to appease a hostile public.

The technocrats aren’t entirely wrong to worry about this. Public opinion can be cruel. Democratic consent can endorse injustice. The majority can tyrannise minorities.

But the alternative — ignoring consent and hoping you can hold the line — is also failing. The populists are winning anyway. The hostile public is getting what it wants through Reform, through Trump, through Le Pen. The “protection” offered by technocratic resistance is illusory if the technocrats keep losing.

The Hard Balance

The actual task is:

1. Acknowledge that loss of consent is a crisis, not a nuisance
2. Engage with public concerns as legitimate, even when you disagree
3. Restore a sense of agency — give people real choices, real voice
4. Make the case for what you believe, genuinely, from scratch
5. Be willing to change what can be changed
6. Hold the line on what genuinely can’t be compromised, but explain why

This is harder than technocracy. It requires politicians who can actually persuade, not just manage. It requires honesty about tradeoffs. It requires treating the public as partners, not problems.

Most centrist politicians can’t do this. They weren’t selected for it. They don’t have the skills. Their instinct when challenged is to reach for a study, not to connect with a feeling.

The Underlying Question

Can liberal democracy survive if it requires the consent of a public that finds truth oppressive?

Vexler’s advice is: meet them where they are. Restore agency first. Then maybe truth becomes bearable again.

But what if it doesn’t work? What if restoring agency still leads them to choose the lie? What if, given real power, they choose Trump anyway?

Then you’ve empowered the very thing you were trying to prevent.

There’s no guarantee this works. There’s only the observation that the current approach — lecturing, dismissing, managing — is definitely failing.

Sometimes you have to try something else not because you’re confident it will work, but because what you’re doing certainly won’t.