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ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini tend to express more progressive political beliefs than their users. Grok leans a little bit to the right, but if you're using Grok as your chatbot of choice, there's a good chance that even though it's net conservative, you're more conservative than that. If you happen to be progressive, you don't have to think too hard about why aggregating all human knowledge and then creating smarter and smarter artificial intelligence would happen to agree with you: those AIs must be pretty smart to discover that you've been right about everything all along! But you might come to the troubling realization that at other points in human history, whoever had access to the most cutting-edge media distribution tools had the exact same experience: someone who dialed up for the first time in the late 90s could read Wired and learn all about how vaguely libertarian techno-optimism was what all the smart people believed; someone rich enough to own a radio in the mid-1920s would hear all about how marvellously President Coolidge was handling the economy, the very first message sent by telegraph not only assumed that the recipient believed in God but didn't bother specifying which one—a possibility that would be shocking to an infotech elite in 10th century Córdoba or Cairo. The saying goes that the media exist to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but people only invent and repeat catchy phrases like this when the natural behavior is otherwise. And, as it turns out, advertisers pay generous CPMs to reach the comfortable, and the afflicted tend to close the tab when they hit a paywall.

LLMs are different. Users choose what to ask them: if you want to feed ChatGPT a few news stories from your local paper and rewrite them from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective, or in accordance with the tenets of the Bull Moose Party, you can do so. But if you ask them general political questions, they tend to lean left: a recent Washington Post analysis ($) (mercifully free of that "Here's how LLMs behave: we asked GPT-4o to..." thing) showed that every model tended to provide a left-leaning answer to open-ended political questions, with even Grok tilting that way slightly more often than the opposite, Gemini 3.1 Pro being mostly neutral but still a little left, and both OpenAI and DeepSeek delivering a larger number of progressive answers than neutral or conservative combined.

This is important. It's a big deal for end users if they're getting a systematically biased view of the world, especially if what they think they're getting is a neutral one. That’s useful even if they have an incorrect idea of what’s biased and what’s neutral. A doctor who gets accused of being fatphobic might well be right that a given patient would really benefit from some GLP-1 agonists. And understanding why LLMs behave this way actually tells us some interesting things about the world, and how relatively small differences in conservatives' and progressives' preferences and temperaments get magnified again and again, leading to the slant we see.

(I like to keep this publication as politically neutral as possible, with a focus on systems and implementation rather than on the outcomes being pursued. That doesn't mean I don't have political views, just that my business judgment tells me a partisan slant would make half of the readers slightly happy and the other half really mad. Aesthetically, I've found that people whose usual beat is not strictly politics get a lot less insightful when they expand to politics. And, as a matter of vanity: there are many commentators for whom it would be very fun to hear a debate between them-circa-June-2020 and them-circa-November-2024. So, this is more an attempt to understand modern political media and its feedback loop with LLMs than an effort to support one side, but either way will inevitably have some biases that readers ought to try to identify and take into account. If in doubt, ask Fable.)

Anyway, one simple but very popular hypothesis is that the reason models are biased is that conservatives are not as bright as progressives, so when you ask about abortion or affirmative action, the model is smart enough to give you the correct, progressive answer. Conservatism is broadly more comfortable with group differences being evidence that groups differ rather than evidence there's bias—a conservative can look at the gender pay gap and attribute it to men having a stronger preference for high incomes, or married couples rationally having one person specialize in earning and the other focus more on kids. This can be cast as a strict binary, but it can also be discussed as overlapping distributions; the existence of Gwynne Shotwell does not disprove the observation that people running big companies tend to be men. And that can be a valid conservative argument from the perspective of tradition and natural law, or biology, or even if we're all blank slates and gender roles are a pure social construct.¹ So, to the extent that there's an intelligence gap between those two sides, it's fortunate from a utilitarian perspective that the people disfavored by it are the ones who view such gaps as useful information about reality rather than some kind of social problem. Of course, if you make this generalization, some conservatives will take it personally. It takes a lot of effort to respond neutrally to negative generalizations about a group you're a part of. Everybody's got a plan to incorporate group differences into their worldview until they get punched in the ego.

And you can check: use education as a proxy for intelligence and you'll see that 5% of voters without a high-school education tend to have consistently liberal views, and is 12% for some college, 24% for college graduates, and 31% for people with postgraduate degrees. But, the more time you spend with people at the edge of that spectrum, the less likely you are to see educational attainment as a pure proxy for intelligence. There are, certainly, people who are not bright enough to hack it at a good school. And there are people who, if they were a little brighter, could have come up with better ways to spend four years than getting a PhD. But we don't have to give up! What if we just look at a meta-analysis of how intelligence correlates with expressing conservative or authoritarian attitudes, with an r of -.20? That looks a little weaker, but it's closer to answering the question we're asking.

You should probably put very low credibility on this kind of thing. It's just very hard to ask questions about worldviews without accidentally stacking the deck in favor of your own. And, by the same token, it's incredibly easy to engineer the results that you want if you deliberately formulate the questions that way. For example, if you ask "Should the government support hereditary titles that give a narrow set of lucky descendants financial benefits, such as exclusive rights to perform certain jobs for higher-than-market pay, or subsidies that allow them to continue residing at their ancestral estate," then almost everyone will say no, unless they're part of a conservative tradition that was already in decline by the time the US was founded. If you smirk and then reveal—surprise!—that the hereditary title is a membership in the International Longshoremen's Association and that ancestral estate is a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, they'll be annoyed with you. But if they're annoyed enough to keep talking, they will probably soften the argument, add some nuance, and explain why they feel there's a difference between the views they have and the ones you asked them about.² It's also hard to accurately categorize views. Kim Jong Il and Lee Kuan Yew were both on the authoritarian end of the spectrum relative to most national leaders in the late twentieth century, but they had very different ideologies, leading to very different outcomes.³ If you use preexisting data from a broad set of questions—if you check the General Social Survey—you find a verbal IQ difference of about a fifth of a standard deviation. In SAT score terms, this would be the difference between a 1030 (the national average) and a 1075, or between graduating from the average high school in your city and graduating from a 58th-percentile high school instead. If you were to compare two colleges that had those as the average SAT score for admittance, you would not be surprised if the alumni from the second went on to be a bit more successful, on average. You'd find it very peculiar indeed if the second school's alumni were overrepresented basically everywhere you looked, by an overwhelming margin. You'd think: there must be something else going on here.

There are many other things going on here.

The first selection effect to think about happens at the level of people. If you are, temperamentally, a conservative, there is a good chance that you will want to marry, have kids, and ensure that these kids are provided for both in terms of material comforts and in terms of quality caregiving, ideally from a parent. There are many more life paths compatible with a progressive outlook on life (including, of course, the family-and-job one above), but they probably lean more towards self-expression, making the world a better place, addressing broad social problems, etc. You might imagine some promising college senior who's been told by their teachers that they have an exceptional grasp of how taxes work, and that they'd be equally successful if they went to law school and specialized in tax law, or if they went into journalism and covered all the sneaky ways rich people and big companies minimize their tax burden. If that student has a pretty conservative outlook, and wants to have their 2.2 kids some time in their thirties, it's going to be pretty hard to do that earning journalist wages and paying a New York cost of living. If they choose that money-maximizing initial path, and move to the suburbs because they get plenty of noisy nightlife through the baby monitor, they're making a choice that's more compatible with the values conservatives have and advocate. They're also opting out of playing a big role in shaping people's values, by choosing what stories to cover and how to cover them. They'll contribute some useful tokens here and there, perhaps on the nuances on the exact point at which a spinoff qualifies for Reverse Morris Trust treatment or whatever. But the other hypothetical version of them is better-represented in the training data.

But they're also better-represented in real-world status competitions. The number of people who care about political issues is far larger than the number who will do a deep dive into some problem and figure out whether that particular fish is really endangered enough to block the construction of a new dam, or to dig through the numbers and learn just how much overtime some public employees are claiming. But they sure will read about it! Or rather, they might read a story about how feckless developers are destroying biodiversity, or a story about how no, if you keep splitting a species into arbitrarily tiny subpopulations, you'll eventually be able to gerrymander one of them into being endangered. You might read a story about overtime abuse, or you might read one about how our infrastructure is crumbling but the legislature won't vote for much-needed spending. Maybe you'll read a story about "welfare queens," or maybe you'll see a story about how there was one incredibly busy woman who committed a lot of brazen fraud and is basically responsible for the archetype. It's just unavoidable that writers and editors will cover things that fit their worldview in more detail than the things that don't, and that their view of what constitutes an issue worth covering will affect what gets written about—whether that's in the sense that they care, or in the sense that they're wielding their influence in order to shape society in their preferred direction. This is not universal; the NYT did a great job covering disability fraud among public employees, and the taxonomic inflation story was also theirs. But passing the ideological Turing Test is hard even when you're trying; if you don't, it's completely unnatural to go out of your way to poke holes in your own worldview.

But the result of this is that, if you're an educated adult, and you follow news written by similarly well-educated adults, you're mostly reading news from people who are a bit to your left. Which means that you're less likely to hear about news stories from your right. (One of Donald Trump's favorite rhetorical moves is to choose some fact that helps his agenda—the number of illegal immigrants residing in the US, for example, or how well the stock market is doing—then to exaggerate it, so people are shocked by the number they hear when he gets corrected.) If you're not going to deeply investigate every news story you read, and also spin up your own newsroom to hunt down the stories the media aren't covering, you're inevitably going to have a worldview that's shaped by the assumptions of the people you choose to read.⁴ People in media consume more text media per capita, and this has a compounding effect on worldviews: if your beat is foreign policy, and you read domestic news from mainstream sources, you're going to read things that, a little more often than in true reality, smoothly slot into your existing worldview. It will feel like the whole thing is a bit more consistent than it really is. (The AI labs have a term for what happens if you blindly feed a model outputs from previous iterations of that model, without doing some very careful independent checks for both accuracy and originality. It's called "model collapse," and it's not a good thing.)

Conservatives with a taste for high culture are aware of this. If they go to an art museum, or the symphony, or read some new translation of Cervantes or Dostoevsky, they know that a large fraction of the people they share this experience with, and who produced it, absolutely hate their guts and think they're unreconstructed troglodytes. These conservatives can take some comfort in the fact that all of the artists and writers and composers they love held at least some beliefs that would get them ejected from polite company—but it's a little lonely when most of your closest friends are people who died more than a century before you were born. On the other hand, they get used to it: reading something innocuous that randomly throws in an insulting reference to a group you're a part of is just something they expect, and don't have to take personally, in the same way that if I were visiting Germany and someone yelled at me for jaywalking, I wouldn't wonder why that person had singled me out. That’s just how they do things; being cosmopolitan means being aware and tolerant of local customs even if you don’t like them much.

But this asymmetry in reactions means that bringing politics into some unrelated news story is easier for one side than the other, and that makes those political views feel more uniform than they are. It's a bit like the asymmetry where diversity in who gets cast in ads is more salient to minorities than to the majority; as in many other indirectly-democratic systems, who gets their way depends on numbers multiplied by willingness to participate.

Politics is also more central to progressives' lives than to conservatives'; if your moral commitments skew more universal (making sure everyone can live a dignified life, protecting the environment, etc.) they're a big part of your world. But if your interests are more conservative, they're more parochial—it's entirely proper for a conservative to be focused on their family, rather than on the broader concept of the family; if someone spent so much time on his commitment to protecting traditional marriage that his wife got sick of it and left him, that's a big failure. Focusing on specific personal ties over general issues is just a conservative way to behave, and that's common enough that conservatives can joke about it—when Phyllis Schlafly debated Betty Friedan over the equal rights amendment, she opened with "I'd like to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come here tonight." And it's hard to take her project seriously without believing that she wasn't completely kidding.⁵ This priority gap has another fun twist to it: in general, well-educated people are more likely to be on the left, especially on social issues—but they’re also more likely to act like social conservatives! Getting married, staying married, not having kids until they’re married, etc. Given that they’re more likely to report being atheist or agnostic, the minimal gap in religious service attendance between college grads and those without degrees implies that among well-educated people who espouse a religion, attendance is higher. Put another way: on social issues, Republicans vote for the state to compel them to act more like Democratic elites. 

Those conservatives who have political opinions, but don't treat those opinions as incredibly important, are going to be less inclined to subscribe to conservative magazines that do deep investigative journalism, and a bit more likely to get their news from conservative TV, or, more recently, streaming video. Every minute of video time has an opportunity cost, it's hard to segment it out to differently sophisticated audiences—it's just hard to execute a programming pivot from a story about an illegal immigrant who murdered someone at 7 o'clock to a panel discussing optimal taxation of stock buybacks at 7:30. So they tend to aim for the big fat middle of the bell curve. This has been exacerbated as media got more national; local media is less partisan-coded, and there are plenty of Democratic mayors who cleaned up downtown by locking up the drug dealers and plenty of Republican mayors whose big achievement is how much local schools improved. Many national-level partisan topics tie into local issues, but on a local level the debate is usually not about "regulation" or "the environment" and more about whether the construction noise from a proposed new datacenter is worth tolerating if it means sales tax can come down a little bit and the city will still have enough money to fix up that aging sewage treatment plant.

The media ecosystem that made that possible—the local paper that would tell you if the new bridge was over or under budget, behind or ahead of schedule—had a hard time competing with AM radio and cable, an even harder time with the text-first Internet, and basically no shot against short-form video. Ever sit down on the couch, take out your phone and suddenly realize that you've zoned out for an hour reading story after story about proposed changes to the city's bus routes? (Okay, you're reading Capital Gains, so maybe you have. But by reading a long-form article that's trying to understand partisan differences in media representation without deciding in advance which side is over- or under-represented because they are very bad people already puts you in a weird demographic.)

We've talked a lot about people: how they choose which jobs to take, how they choose which media to consume, the feedback loops this creates, etc. Now, let's talk about tokens. Being a conservative means wanting to conserve something, which means it's something that already exists and that you don't need to paint a picture. If capitalism is good and you don't want to mess it up, there's proof every time you go to a grocery store or (at least as of this piece’s publication date) check on your 401(k). If someone's going to suggest a particular kind of progress from there, they need to articulate it: here's what a city-run grocery store would be like, here's how you'd pull it off, here's why it would be cheaper than Kroger.⁶ Similarly, a very large majority of Americans forty years ago were perfectly okay with the absence of gay marriage. Maybe they had gay friends and it didn't occur to them to wonder if those friends wanted to get married—or, perhaps more practically, if those gay friends wanted to be able to visit one another in the hospital, or for one to collect survivor's benefits when the other died, or inherit from one another without an extra inheritance tax bill. Maybe they didn't have gay friends, or for one reason or another didn't realize any of their friends were gay. Maybe they were homophobic. But if they were, opposing gay marriage in 1986 wasn't really a political opinion, it was a non-sequitur. It's like announcing today that you don't care how high copper prices are, you're never going to support melting down the Statue of Liberty and selling it to China—who do you think you’re arguing with? For a progressive's idea of progress to happen, that idea has to be articulated, argued for, and defended. To be a progressive is to adopt a more token generation-intensive form of politics. Opponents of gay marriage started writing about it after advocates started talking about why they wanted it, which meant that even when conservatives were adding tokens to the training data, those tokens implicitly adopted the framing of the other side. 

This is not, of course, to say that there is nothing for conservatives to write about. There is! But if you wanted to pick one big metonym for an ideologically conservative publication, you'd probably choose the National Review.⁷ And how did they talk about who they were and what they were trying to accomplish? "A conservative," wrote Buckley in the first issue, "is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." It's naturally reactive: look at someone else's idea of progress, find the senses in which it's either in the wrong direction or a kind of regress, and fire a broadside against it. Weeds are why gardeners have jobs, plumbers wouldn't have much to do if pipes never leaked, and if my kids weren't so assiduous about ensuring that the floor of every room in the house had a confetti of Legos, crayons, Magna-Tiles, board game pieces, and forgotten snack wrappers, I wouldn't have so many opportunities to help around the house. (The dog helps, too, if the snacks weren't finished.) Conservative media is in a similar spot: what gives it purpose is that, from its perspective, the fight against entropy is never over.

Not all of that writing is about current events. Political writing can include broader, more theoretical work, or work that articulates some grand theory as an explanation for current events. But it’s hard to top Burke or Carlyle or Voegelin or Strauss or Oakeshott, and if you're a lover of tradition, it might feel faintly blasphemous to try. Whereas it's fine to out-Bentham Bentham, as Singer did, or to out-Singer Singer, like David Benatar.⁸ Conservatives still have material, both in theoretical and practical terms. There are news stories and story angles that are more appealing to a conservative audience, and if the conservative viewpoint is right, over time you'd expect advances in different fields to be compatible with it—"survival of the fittest" is a description of Darwin, but it was coined by Herbert Spencer, who wanted to use it to justify less regulation. (Spencer sounds conservative today, but would then have been classified as a liberal, partly because the US and Europe just use "liberal" in a different sense—in the US it means moderate left, in Europe it means moderate libertarian—and partly because he was advocating change! Shaking things up! Shifting power from lazy Tory landlords to energetic Whiggish capitalists! But conservatism is not the rejection of progress, just a judicious approach to it, particularly if it's presented as moral rather than material progress; at some point, the politically orphaned Spencer found himself adopted by the right.) Genetic research on modern populations and ancient graves presents evidence in favor of the worldview of noted conservative philosopher Robert E. Howard, whose lightly-fictionalized model of ancient European history involved burly blonde barbarians conquering wimpy farmers and imposing their will on decadent and suspiciously oriental empires. (Okay, fine, Otto Schrader beat him to it, in one of those amazing cross-disciplinary bankshots where you scoop the geneticists by over a century when you notice that every ancient language has totally different words for concepts like "plough" and "pot" and "grain" but that their word for the animal ridden by the guy telling them where to plough and then telling them "great, now put the grain in the pot and hand it over" always sounded kind of like "h₁éḱwos.")

Economics, in particular, has been a field that helped conservatives turn some of their more emotional instincts—such as "I worked hard for this money and don't want to hand it over to lazy bums on welfare"—into more scalpel-like assessments of market efficiency and perverse incentives. It turns out that the price system is actually pretty good at allocating resources, even if it doesn't provide any moral clarity about whether orphans and people who get cripplingly maimed on the job should just do us all a favor and starve to death a little more quietly. On the practical question of how to allocate resources, conditioning on optimal resource allocation being the most pressing problem in the world, your local small business owner complaining about pointless red tape or the cost of adding a wheelchair-accessible ramp to his skating rink was actually making a pretty good point about how blanket regulation often leads to waste.⁹

You can argue that economics isn't really a science, and maybe that's true. It’s a tool for formalizing questions so they can be reasoned about, that will always be limited by the gap between what you can formalize and the state of the world, and that gap is unusually large when a relevant state of the world is whatever's going on in any one person's head. But that itself is useful, because it tells you the limits of what you can prove: if you can't ultimately measure people's preferences, other than by the brute-force method of presenting them with two options, seeing which they choose, and imputing that preference to future choices, then you'll always have uncertainty. But you'll also have a kind of certainty that the only person who can provide that data you're missing may have imperfect knowledge of their own desires, and has an incentive to lie about them. If we achieve a perfect planned economy where all relevant information is instantly exposed and processed, the last question left is whether my claim that what I want is worth "a kajillion" utils beats your claim that your preferences are valued at "Graham's Number of utils."

There’s another discipline that is implicitly conservative but still comes up with new things to say regularly: we have many longstanding traditions where every new piece of information is interpreted in light of a fixed set of rules, and a growing corpus of previous interpretations. This exists in English common law, the Talmud, Catholic doctrine, and many other traditions. It's actually a common design pattern to basically say "Okay, Jesus did not specifically talk about embryo selection during the Sermon on the Mount," or "Maimonides did not, as it turns out, address whether reading cached inputs is meaningfully different from generating new ones." But you can build on what you have, and changes in technology and social norms are typically incremental enough that whatever the new thing is, there's something that it's like, and even if that something is completely beyond anything discussed by the people who laid down the original rules, you can build up, piece by piece, a framework to deal with it.

From a religious perspective, religion gives you all the context you need to understand what's going on here. Compared to pedestrian issues like how you spend your handful of decades on earth, eternity is all that matters. But from a pragmatic, building-functional-institutions standpoint, this approach still has merit. A conservative can say: you can tell these institutions function because they’re old, so just through brute-force we’ve identified a bunch of things that could have killed them and haven’t.¹⁰ It is, in some deep fundamental sense, anchored to things your grandparents would regard as sensible, and that your grandkids could recognize as understandable, even if they don't quite agree.

But, critically, what gives it so much practical force is that some real institution, made out of real people, says it's a big deal. They're staking their reputation, and they're staking the fate of the people who listen to them, on the judgments they make. The role of conservative intellectuals, in an AI context, is to be out of the loop. More of what they say is already in-distribution: you didn't think of X, that doesn't work because of Y, your argument is reasonable and yet I will not budge because of Z. If you're finding your way to something new, you can do it in text, and that text is legible to an AI and constitutes useful training data that helps the AI understand the world. But if you're defending something old, that you cherish, something that makes you think: I will never fully appreciate how much I benefit from this, because I'm benefiting from more-than-a-lifetime's worth of other people's hard experiences—if that's what you're protecting, then the important work you do is out-of-sample. You stake your reputation, and that of the tradition you're supporting, on the proposition that whatever the average statistical tendency of all the text in the world says you should do, there's a particular text, or a particular beyond-textual moral sense, that tells you you have to do otherwise.

AI is progressive, mostly because having progressive values suggests opting in to fields where you have a marginal impact on a large number of people (ideally by producing surprising but nonrandom sequences of tokens) rather than having a definitive impact on a smaller subset of people (raising your son to be a good man, or your daughter to be a good woman, or showing your direct reports what a good boss does, or demonstrating to your flock what a spiritual leader is). If an AI agent fails at some task, no worries! Spin up a dozen more, give them twelve slight variants on the task, have them all go to work, pick the best one, and never give a second's thought to the unlucky eleven. But when there's a human in the loop, and an institution with some earned credibility, the stakes are higher and you can't just stop it, lament the excess inference spend, and try again. For the jobs where the need for a human in the loop is a philosophical necessity rather than a liability-minimizing gesture, and where that human needs to stake centuries to millennia of trust on a judgement call, AI can't participate until the average person thinks an AI has higher moral weight than a person. And until then, there will be a necessary opacity to the training data, a blind spot that can't be removed because it responds to illegible incentives. AI will always be progressive because progress comes from brute-forcing possibly good futures by throwing endless text at them, and it will always be insufficiently conservative because it's so hard to tokenize what conservative intellectuals do. So the models will probably stay biased by default.

This piece ties together many different Diff themes:

• We’ve recently talked about how changes in taste for sequels versus originals are downstream from economic constraints in the movie business.

• The knowledge that gets tokenized is straight from the maybesphere.

• Changes in distribution mean that the people who are the worst ideological fit for a given publication are more likely to go independent, making the organization they leave more partisan ($).

• One conservative use case for LLMs: take some tradition whose origin you don’t understand, and ask why it was adopted and why it persisted ($).

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1  People like to treat "social construct" as meaning "fake," rather than something closer to "the one of many stable arrangements we might reach through some mix of deliberate social engineering and random chance plus path-dependence. But also, yeah, the arrangement we’ve all reached." Property rights, for example, are a social construct. And if you decide that this means you can steal someone's car, you will interact with a series of other social constructs culminating in the very real physical fact that prison is a pretty unpleasant place to be, whether or not, in some philosophical sense, all of the rules that put you there are arbitrary.

2  Rhetorical moves like this will almost never convince the person you're talking to: people don't usually begin some political awakening by falling for a rehearsed trick question, and are more likely to just come up with such a question of their own. But it does convince bystanders, or at least suggests to them that this is a topic worthy of debate. "The people who are skeptical of unions and rent control might be cleverer than the ones who aren't" is a useful little update, even if it isn't, and shouldn't be, persuasive on its own. What it should persuade people to do is look into the matter with an open mind, and perhaps perform the test of rephrasing something in different terms and seeing if it still sounds reasonable. If you want to avoid falling for these little tricks, the only way to do it is to practice restating your beliefs in terms that a hostile debater would use—"Yes, I support stripping Americans of their God-given right to defend themselves from both criminals and tyrannical government, and here's why" or "I believe that we should uproot someone from the only life they've known because their parents brought them across an arbitrary line." If you bite a lot of bullets, you'll learn to recognize the taste and texture of bullets yet unbitten, even if they're hidden inside something tastier.

3  Lee Kuan Yew doesn't really fit into modern categories, partly because of scale—he was a ruler of a national government, but its size and population were closer to that of a big city. And ideologically, he's partly hard to pin down because mayors get judged more on pragmatic outcomes than ideology—sewer socialism works better as a local rather than national model—and because he was in a sense the last of the British Empire's viceroys, the personality type who, a few generations earlier, might have spent some happy years at Oxford reading Ancient Greek and dropping witticisms in Latin before realizing that it's time to grow up and get a serious job like running Australia or Yemen.

4  This worked in the other direction in the past, and, in terms of how many people specific media executives had power over, was actually more severe. If you got your news from TV, and the networks didn't put McCarthy on TV, you'd get a very different view of the world. If you read Time, it must have come as quite a surprise that China went, and stayed, communist. You'd be reading for years that Chiang's victory was at hand, if he just got a little more help from the US! By the end, this was wrong in two ways: not only was Chiang losing, but so many of the communist fighters' weapons were weapons captured from retreating nationalists that Mao jokingly referred to Chiang as "our supply officer."

5  One of my favorite political paradoxes is that both sides need lots of class traitors. Conservatives need people who will spend a lot of time in school, blow some of their best child-rearing years working for low pay at conservative magazines, write big bold books about the way things ought to be run, etc. Meanwhile, all those progressives living in similarly cramped conditions had to have parents who could afford to have kids, send them to the schools you need to attend in order to get that critical internship, maybe subsidize them for a while longer while they're finding their footing, etc. Someone who has kids and can afford both tuition at a good college and to live in a good school district, and who chooses to spend their money in this way, is more likely than not to vote Republican. Not by a huge margin, but on average. And the conservative coalition tends to be composed of a few big interest groups that lean slightly to the right, while a progressive coalition will have more small groups that are very politically-aligned. For example, even though evangelicals were a prominent part of the Republican coalition (though less so recently) and even though the Republicans nominated the only major-party Mormon presidential candidate, the religious affiliation that most strongly predicts political views is atheism. Republicans have a slight majority of the omnivore vote, but Democrats have a lock on vegetarians.

6  It is kind of hard to make that case given that grocery stores have notoriously thin margins, and that back when they reported this number, Kroger actually lost money on selling food and made it back on slotting fees, i.e. the money Heinz pays so their pricier ketchup is at eye level and the cheaper but pretty similar-tasting brand is a shelf or two lower. The same returns to scale that led to the industry consolidating also make it very hard for a subscale operator to break in, though in a business with high fixed costs, where inventory turns make a big difference, it helps to have a charismatic spokesman who's always on social media and TV and always clearly having a great time. It'll be an educational experience, though one of the educational prerequisites here is having a lot of experience un-adjusting Adjusted EBITDAs.

7  Among other measures of their influence, William F. Buckley set the template for how to become a conservative firebrand: be the token right-winger on campus at a good school, and write a book about it after you graduate. So we've had God and Man at Dartmouth, Harvard, Dartmouth again, and Sunny UCLA, then ideally try to do a few campus tours where you debate undergraduates—this will be their first big debate and the third one you've had this week, so it's going to be pretty easy to steamroll them.

8  And, yes, there are people who tried to out-Benatar Benatar, and however clever and daring the theory was, the praxis naturally leads to a dead end.

9  I'm still recovering from my busted patellar tendon, faster than expected, and the Americans with Disabilities Act has been incredibly convenient to me—there's always a ramp! But there are ultimately exactly three possibilities, only two of which are reasonable to consider: either we don't have enough ramps, or we have too many. You're just not going to write a rule that perfectly balances things, but the Nth small business owner is less compelling than an actual person who's stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of their life and wants to know just how much of the world is now permanently off-limits, so this is probably one of those things that has its heart in the right place and overshoots a little bit. Which is a good bullet-biting opportunity for progressives: probably the most compelling argument here is that America is a very rich country and it's better to do a little too much for Americans in the most need than to do a little too little.

10  Some of them go further. Hilaire Belloc took this reasoning to what you may or may not consider its logical conclusion: “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine—but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”