{"id":268,"date":"2025-03-12T06:06:26","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T06:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/03\/12\/can-ukraine-and-america-survive-donald-trump-the-new-yorker\/"},"modified":"2025-03-12T06:23:49","modified_gmt":"2025-03-12T06:23:49","slug":"can-ukraine-and-america-survive-donald-trump-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/03\/12\/can-ukraine-and-america-survive-donald-trump-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Ukraine\u2014and America\u2014Survive Donald Trump? | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

America has been berserk for as long as\u2014Philip Roth: \u201cthe indigenous American berserk.\u201d Now we have social media, and it\u2019s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it\u2019s encouraged because it\u2019s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance\u2014all of this is now how you make money, not just how you show your resentment and your outrage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/head>Russian grand strategy for, I don\u2019t know, three centuries has been the following: West decline! Have the West implode and collapse, and<\/span> <\/span><\/span>then<\/em> <\/span><\/span>we\u2019ll survive. That\u2019s Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They\u2019re horrible in Russia, but, hey, if the West implodes\u2014if the West defeats itself, if the West is undermining its own policies and strengths\u2014then Russia will be O.K. This is your fear. This is what you\u2019re talking about: that Trump is doing Putin\u2019s work for him<\/span>.<\/p>\n
Now we have social media, which is much more radical and disruptive, because everybody is a publisher now. Everybody has a megaphone now. It\u2019s been massively destabilizing, and we\u2019re worried that the authoritarians are gaining the upper hand, just like it happened with Mussolini and Goebbels in radio; just like it happened with television. And it turned out that we mastered and assimilated those as a free society, and now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama, and then it produced Trump. So that\u2019s the reality we\u2019re in now.<\/p>\n
How do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don\u2019t know the answer to that, but I believe that in the short run, we\u2019re all dead. China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But, in the long run, we\u2019re good. Because we have the better system, we have corrective mechanisms, we have a free and open society, we\u2019ve got a judiciary that still works, and we can do this because we\u2019ve done it before. And we\u2019ve come from the depths. The Civil War! Andrew Jackson! There\u2019s a lot in American history that is not necessarily optimistic for the future, and yet we made it through to the other side, and it\u2019s quite possible we\u2019ll make it through the current epoch that we\u2019re in. And certainly I wouldn\u2019t bet on the authoritarians in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy.
\n\u2014 Read on www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-new-yorker-interview\/can-ukraine-and-america-survive-donald-trump<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
America has been berserk for as long as\u2014Philip Roth: \u201cthe indigenous American berserk.\u201d Now we have social media, and it\u2019s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it\u2019s encouraged because it\u2019s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance\u2014all of this is now how you make money, not just how you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}