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The Limitations of Social Democracy

William Timberman

Extracts from a 2021 conversation with moderate Democrats

Here we have the farcical return of social fascism theory from the Weimar era Communists: the real enemy isn’t fascism, it’s social democracy/liberalism.

Making social democracy the enemy of true socialism certainly sounds like an ideological absurdity in the modern context, and no doubt it was one at the time. History’s not been kind to what seems to me nevertheless to have been a perfectly plausible theoretical dispute waged by a group of earnest, if relatively insignificant activists reacting to the ghastly stresses of early industrial capitalism. They can hardly be blamed for not seeing how poorly their ideas would scale. For God’s sake, did any of us see the sanity-rattling effects of Facebook or Twitter coming? Whoopee, Universal Democracy! didn’t scale nearly as well as we expected, nor did Omigod, Total Government Surveillance!

Social democracy and neoliberalism aren’t equivalent, but they are related, in the sense that neoliberalism is the clearest demonstration we’ve had to date of the reasons why the Marxist critique of social democracy was not simply a naive attempt to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Social democracies, even those with parliamentary majorities (I’d go so far as to say especially those with parliamentary majorities), are inherently weak. They cannot defend themselves against the predators among us who, when all else fails, can always blow the trumpet of xenophobia.

What should be as obvious to us good modern social democrats as it was to Marx, is that the Koch brothers of the world, not to mention the Jamie Dimons, will always find a way round our precious delusions about “equal justice under the law.” (Dear, sweet Joe Biden. Does anyone reading this blog actually think that he or the DNC have any idea why people whose great grandparents were yellow dog Democrats are now carrying Trump banners up the Capitol steps? Can nobody in Washington read German?)

But enough. The problem of the corruptions of power, of the subversion of good faith efforts to make human society less savage, won’t be solved any time soon, here or elsewhere. That’s the point of the Jacobin tweet, I think, at least if we’re willing to be charitable. If, in the end, social democracy can offer us only what Brecht once called die gerechte Verteilung der überirdischen Güter, then we really should be more charitable to our hardcore Marxist allies. Talk more, sneer less. It’s a start.

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Your reading is hardly naive, and you’re certainly not missing very much. What I’m proposing is less than an account, and very much less than a justification of historical reality. Rather I’m trying to emphasize how many more threads there are in that reality than there are in narratives such as yours —- or mine, for that matter — that purport to make some general sense of it.

When I say managerial class, I’m not insulting Marx, not in the context of this thread or any other. What I’m looking at, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, to be sure, is the evolution of the international economic and political order in the post-industrial age as examined most recently by Hobsbawm and Slobodian. Not from any great height, mind you, but from the much less exalted perspective of a kid who wanted to know why everyone around him seemed to think that getting his ass shot off in a global war to defend the ill-gotten gains of colonialism was not just the only path to an honorable manhood, but a sacred duty as well.

We all awaken in different beds, and ideology is a fickle mistress at the best of times, but I do think that there’s enough pathology in people who are sure they know where the outer boundaries of reason lie not to trust them to patrol them.

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Stalinism, as usual, has been muddying the waters here. I’ve been referring all along to the pre-1925 KPD, of course. Once Thälmann stuck his oar in, the identities of who represented the working class and who didn’t were of little real interest to anyone above the rank of corporal. As I’ve already said, this maneuvering was more or less the name of the game in the European politics of the 1930s—proxy wars of a kind less familiar to us now than those of the Cold War. To be honest, it baffles me that we didn’t recognize the latter for what they were, given that they arrived so promptly in 1947, even before all the remaining consequences of the 1930s had been decently interred.

Interestingly, these proxy wars were repeated in embarrassingly comic opera fashion in the 1960s, as anyone who was a member of the SDS or their European equivalents at the time could tell you. I have vivid memories of sitting on folding chairs in the damp cinder block basements of community centers or empty university classrooms back then, listening to emissaries from the CPUSA or SWP explaining at great length to us earnest cherubs of the New Left precisely how one recognized pre-revolutionary conditions. Sigh…. Green as we were then, we definitely weren’t that green.

Nothing for you to bother yourself about, of course. Just trying to keep the dog-eared edges of the leftist error archives all squared up for the next go-round with the forces of reaction.

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I don’t read steven t johnson’s comments, and as a result I’m not going to understand the meaning of your comment that begins with this remark unless you explain what it is that you think steven t johnson is right about.

Well, if you don’t read his comments, it must be for some reason. If the reason is that you haven’t found them worth your time, then you’ll probably come to the same conclusion about mine. Which, in the greater scheme of things, is probably as it should be.

One other thing, though. I’m happy to concede that whether or not the leadership of the KPD could rightly be called an insignificant group of activists depends on one’s perspective. Early on in this cataclysm we’ve been describing, they looked powerful enough. From my perspective, the street level characterization of their potential as a mass movement as depicted in Berlin Alexanderplatz, although somewhat romanticized, is probably accurate enough. In any event, Döblin was there, and I was not.

In the broader view, though, the backing of those who controlled the means of production went a long way toward making the NSDAP, rather than the KPD, the party of the working class. The Comintern was simply in no position to match resources with them. Similar events played out in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. So, as an old SDSer (Students for a Democratic Society, not Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, just so’s there’s no confusion.) who still thinks the Port Huron Statement was a pretty good idea, I rate them insignificant in their effects on the outcome of the left/right battles of the 30s, not in the lingering influence of their ideas.

The left has always had the same enemies, and being able to outsmart them has rarely helped us much when it comes down to the inevitable power struggle. In that sense, the radical left of 1918 in Germany did turn out to be insignificant, as have I and my comrades of 1968. It’s a long war, though, and whatever happened during our own time in the trenches, we’ve no reason to regret the part we played in it. As insignificances go, I believe ours was very much worth pursuing. Presumably theirs was too, else why would I be here?

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This squabble over what the voting tallies revealed about which—if any—party represented the German working class pre 1933 is pretty much all my fault, and I apologize for the consternation I seem to have caused.

When I said that those who controlled the means of production were partly responsible for making the NSDAP the party of the working class, I meant it to be an ironic observation. Given the audience, I should probably have taken a little more straightforward approach. (Irony is dead, after all. It’s only the battle scars of us old curmudgeons on the left that make us shy away from assisting in the funerary preparations.) Anyway, in more detail, my view of the matter goes something like this:

a) In times of stress, the powerful in first world societies prefer the right to the left, and direct their support accordingly. This was as true of Trump, at least initially, as it was of Hitler, but we comfort ourselves with the thought that our institutions are more resilient, and our times are not as dire. So far that has proven to be true. Will it still be true four years from now, or even two years from now?

b) The Bolsheviks, most especially Stalin, considered control of European left parties to be essential to their geopolitical interests. (Which was probably not as paranoid an assessment as it might seem, given that they were still embroiled in fending off the White insurrection and its Western supporters.) If one is seeking a motive for the Comintern’s poisonous meddling in the affairs of all German parties of the left from 1918 on, there seems no reason to look any further.

c) The SPD was preoccupied with its own internal schism over the war, and was no longer the undivided voice of working class interests, if indeed it ever had been.

d) After the Hindenburg intervention, the Reichstag fire, and more particularly after the passage of the second Gleichschaltungsgesetz, there was arguably only one working class party in Germany, regardless of the private allegiances of individuals. And no, the responsibility for this outcome wasn’t directly or entirely attributable to the paranoia of plutocrats, but they were definitely a significant part of the unholy alliance that was responsible.

The moral of this story seems simple enough to me: the center, including so-called social democratic parties, invariably seeks to protect itself from the right, and the cheapest way to do this is to betray the genuine interests of the left. In desperate times this may mean making a Hawley or even a Quisling out of yourself. In times of relative stability, it’s generally safe to remain a Clinton.

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Yes, that might for the best. I am curious, though, given his pedigree and curriculum vitae, when and why you think he became a Trumpist extremist. Looking at the record, you could be forgiven for concluding he’s not likely to be a social democrat, but would you have figured him for a fascist collaborator?

As long as we’re considering metamorphoses, have a look at LBJ, the greatest American social democrat of our era. How come, do you suppose, he felt he needed to gift his enemies on the right with a colonial war? What do you make of Bill and Hillary, modest social democrats, at least by Arkansas standards? What in the name of Moloch does Bill’s welfare reform, or Hillary’s savagery toward the Honduran left have to do with the ideals of social democracy? If we skip over to Germany and look at the modern SPD’s support for Hartz IV, we could easily make the same observation. From my perspective, given social democrats like these, one might as well be a communist, assuming one is going to be a leftist at all.

You say the left is stupid to take positions that keep them from winning elections. The truth is, the beautifully reasonable with all deliberate speed folks, modest social democrats absolutely included, have led us to where we are today. Are they happy now? Is anyone?

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I’m pretty sure some people are happy now. Do you know nobody who is happy?

You say you haven’t heard of Döblin, but I’m guessing you probably have heard of Brecht:

Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn/Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende/Hat die furchtbare Nachricht/Nur noch nicht empfangen.

And now I really am out of here. Thanks for all the fish….

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steven t johnson has the historical right of it here, I’m afraid. There just isn’t any sure way to reason in advance with the forces of history. You pays your political capital — to the extent that you understands it — and you takes your choice. Sometimes you end up face down in a ditch even before the issue is ever truly joined, sometimes you end up among the Trümmerfrauen, with only the vaguest inkling of what it was all about in the first place. Occasionally you survive to write an die Nachgeborenen, or establish and ordain the Marshall Plan and the Strategic Air Command.

So, okay, what have we really learned in the 100 years since Liebknecht and Luxemburg stumbled into martyrdom, and the SPD traded its birthright for a mess of nationalist pottage? Are we talking a modest reasonableness here, or sclerosis? One might be forgiven for thinking that the ship has been righted, and that we shouldn’t mess with it the way Jacobin would have us do, but I doubt even Francis Fukuyama believes that suppressing the antithesis is a foolproof guarantee that the dialectic will never trouble us again.

Did neoliberalism and the managerial class successfully navigate the end of the Pax Americana, and lead us not into temptation, but into a peaceful multipolar world order? In a word, no. Are we wrong to think that instead they gave us casino capitalism, the rustbelt, and in their zeal to eradicate anything to the left of the managerial class, the idiocracy of Trump? I think we could come reasonably close to making that case. No one wants us to, of course, who stands to lose from anything like a necessary and sufficient reform of the status quo. Sadly, this often seems to include, if not exactly everyone, almost everyone I get to talk to.

Still, we persist. I’m old, so my persistence is of less consequence than it used to be, but I do, nevertheless, make my tithe to the DSA, not the DNC, and reckon that Bhaskar Sunkara is underrated. Best I can manage under the circumstances.

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At 77, I’m hardly that young. Anyway, what my age has to do with the nature of our disagreement, I’m not entirely sure. I’m aware that many of the commenters on this blog think that stasis is the surest sign of rationality in politics — the slow boring of hard boards, and all that. A significant number of those same commenters also argue that progress is being made, however slowly, and that people of my political persuasion should take more care not to upset the applecart. In 1968, it was You fools, all you did was get Nixon elected. What I’m hearing now isn’t a lot different.

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. While the Democratic Party in the US continues doing its utmost to snatch defeat from the jaws of its occasional victories, I say this: Unless you’re prepared to lose in the short run, and use the loss to sharpen your arguments, you’re just part of the enemy’s baggage train.

In my more cynical moments, I also wonder at how rarely these putatively moderate positions are taken in good faith. (For the record, I don’t think that was true of LBJ. I agree with Halberstam’s assessment — and yours — about the honesty of his political calculations. Nevertheless I disagree that his was the wisest course possible at the time).

In the case of those Democrats, however, who are consistent in warning us that unless they behave like Republicans, they’ll never be able to govern, and we’ll all suffer for it, I wonder if it’s really the people’s suffering that’s motivating them, rather than the size of the rewards they’ll personally reap from their demonstrations of docility once they leave office. Whose ox is being gored? is always a legitimate question when listening to a politician’s rhetoric. As I look back to 1992–2000, for example, the most charitable thing I can find to say about the Clintons is that they both did their damndest to make sure that come what may, it was never going to be their ox that got itself gored.

As for pointless moral stances, consider the apocryphal quote, supposedly from Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Consider Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, or my observation that in the face of a threatened putsch by at least half of the Republican Party, Biden, like Obama, is still pursuing the chimera of national unity.

So no, you can’t govern if you can’t get elected, but there’s also little point in getting elected if you can’t accomplish what is needful once you do.

Yeah. Okay. Fine.

William Timberman7 Comments

Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.

Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.

The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

William Timberman2 Comments

Lyndon Johnson, our second great emancipator, did his utmost to ship me to Vietnam. Richard J. Daley and his uniformed thugs had my friends beaten up in the streets of Chicago. Hubert Humphrey, the great defender of organized labor, spent the last years of his political career solemnly licking Lyndon Johnson’s boots.

Still, I went to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. On election day I walked a precinct in Southern California until the polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time. I didn’t have the cell phone that would certainly be in my pocket today—I didn’t even have a transistor radio—and so it was that people who opened the last few doors I knocked on in the near darkness of that California evening actually burst out laughing at me before closing the door in my face. I may have been the last person on earth to hear that the election was already over, that McGovern had won only one state and the District of Columbia.

Thirty-four years later, at a fundraiser in Arizona a liberal friend had dragged me to, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, a property developer in Phoenix and ex-chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, let me know in no uncertain terms that it was those anti-war crazies who got Nixon elected, and that we (meaning the Democratic Party) were never going to go there again if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t the only senior Democrat of consequence who’s served me up that deeply cherished nonsense over the years.

And so it’s gone since—the Clintons and their “New Democrats,” Obama’s “more than a collection of red states and blue states,” et cetera, et cetera. The members of the DNC, who, like Godechot’s Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, now reverently present us with the ghost of Joe Biden—take him or leave him—and warn us earnestly that if Trump gets elected in November it’s all going to be our fault again, just as Nixon was in 1968 and 1972, and Trump was in 2016.

To which I say, “I’m done with this. No matter how it goes this time, we’re done. Peddle your paralysis elsewhere.”

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar*

William Timberman

*Human dignity is inviolable (The first sentence of Article I of the postwar Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany)

If we actually wanted any further proof of Santayana’s contention that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we’d need look no further than the current resurgence of fascist sentiment in Europe and the United States, and the rising support worldwide for authoritarian governments devoted primarily to exclusion, punishment, and degradation.

The Germans, of all people, should know better. They did know better in 1949, when their remarkable postwar constitution was written and enacted in the western half of their still divided country. If the strutting members of the AfD have already forgotten what motivated their great-grandparents to enshrine Article I as the only article which by law cannot ever be amended or repealed, there seems little hope that any of the rest of us will remember our considerably more ambiguous commitments to the same principle.

There are reasons why the Nazis are back in Germany, why a paranoid and vicious authoritarianism is once again the shiniest of political baubles everywhere in the world. As comforting as it might be for those who dread what’s coming to think so, none of these reasons can be attributed solely to the historical blindness of the generations born since the end of World War II. The truth of the matter is that neither democracy nor capitalism, as practiced by our supposedly enlightened postwar governments, has ever been overly concerned with the dignity of all human beings.

It should surprise no one who’s been paying attention that in the nearly eighty years since the end of World War II, the distribution of wealth and power in western democracies has gradually come to resemble that of some of the worst hierarchical societies of the past. The disenfranchised, dispossessed, and disenchanted armies of the underemployed and unrepresented are back with us, and they will absolutely not be mollified any more easily by our well-meant homilies about human dignity than they were in 1933. As right-wingers in the United States like to say, the die is cast. It’s hard to see how there’s any good news in that for anybody.

The Apostle’s Creed

William Timberman4 Comments

“Will you tell me the truth?”

“Almost never. The truth is complex, far more complex than my intention. The truth that I will tell you, that I can tell you, is that between human beings intention is everything, and that my intention is to tell you only as much of the truth as I think likely to leave you undamaged.

That’s why you mustn’t trust me. Good intentions are inevitably tainted with both ignorance and condescension. Never mind what Nietzsche said, no one ever gets beyond good and evil. The nature of reality forbids it.”

The Enlightenment’s Farewell Tour

William Timberman6 Comments

In the U.S., the Republicans’ sad entourage of the desperate, demented, and enraged are tearing at the Constitution’s exposed achilles tendons. In Russia the gangsters of Prigozhin are battling the siloviki of Putin for control of the spoils of a twice-failed totalitarian state. In India, Hindutva pursues a scorched-earth battle against Islam. In Germany the AfD tidal wave has engulfed the SPD, broken the CDU, and arrived at last in Bavaria, intent on washing away once and for all what little is still left of the CSU’s liberal democratic pretensions.

In Italy a fascist consumerism has sprung full-grown from the brow of Meloni. The trains now run on time, and foreign investors are once again reassured. In Finland and Sweden, the local populists have decided that white people are the only real people after all. In Israel, Syria, Hungary, Belarus, and Turkey, the warlord grifters have outlasted everyone. In Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, the kings, emirs, sultans and satraps of one kind or another are now completely convinced that having more money than Allah the Merciful means not having to apologize to anyone ever.

In Iran, a cabal of wizened religious fanatics calling themselves the Islamic Republic have yet to see any reason to deny themselves the perverse pleasure of beating and imprisoning women at random, and of shooting their own children whenever the kids act like they might be the coming thing. In China, a suspiciously but undeniably prosperous Communist (sic) Party oligarchy has decided that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is nothing more than a confession of the failures and arrogance of so-called Western civilization.

I don’t think Web 3.0 is going to be a lot of help in preserving what’s left of the secular humanism that evolved over four centuries in Europe, and was sealed with the French and American revolutions. Neither will eleven aircraft carrier battle groups or a triad of delivery systems for nuclear weapons, given that both have long been controlled by people who bear no allegiance whatsoever to secular humanism either as a creed or a philosophy of government.

I’m not one to cry O tempora, o mores! every time someone in Washington does something stupid, but I do think that if the last sad road show of the Enlightenment comes to your town, you should go and listen to what was once promised us, and what very shortly we’ll all be missing.

DeSantis Opens Fire on Fort Sumter

William Timberman

Realists will tell you that DeSantis has done no such thing, but with realists it’s an article of faith, if not a quasi-autonomic reflex, to deny that metaphors have anything to offer them that might alter their certainty about what exists and what doesn’t exist.

I pity them. They belong either in Congress or under a monument somewhere. We should never, ever grant them a role in determining our future, at least not one as large as those they’re constantly proclaiming for themselves. Metaphors embody the perpetually emergent property that distinguishes our species, the interface between being and becoming, the herald of perceptions which weren’t there before, but will alter, perhaps forever, where and how we fit into a future version of our world.

We’re lucky they exist, and we should be grateful that they do. Listen to poets. Do not listen to people who deny that DeSantis has opened fire on Fort Sumter. They are dead inside.

Identity Politics

William Timberman

Je pense, donc je suis.

—Renė Descartes, Discours de la Méthode Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, 1637

I am I because my little dog knows me.

—Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, or the Relation of Human Nature To the Human Mind, 1936.

Gertrude Stein’s little dog may confirm her sense of self, but in doing so it also defines her in terms of a moral obligation which she cannot betray without sacrificing her identify. Our identities as human beings are constructed of many such relationships, many such obligations. We see ourselves reflected in them, and know who we are.

Or do we? René Descartes‘ assertion doesn’t actually deny that we are a part of the society which has created us, or that as a consequence, we have obligations to that society. He would not, I think, disagree with John Donne that no man is an island, entire of itself. Implicit in his assertion nevertheless is the supposition that individual human beings have moral and political agency, that they have the right to assist society in defining what it is, and therefore who they are.

The consequences of Descartes’ assertion, whether or not he was as conscious of them as we are today, are clear enough. If, by virtue of being a rational creature, the individual human being has the right to agency on their own behalf, then there can be no divine right of Popes, Mullahs, Kings, Führers, or General Secretaries to arbitrarily define the collective will of a society, or to censor the behavior of the individuals who comprise it merely because they lack the power as individuals to defend themselves. This is the founding principle of the Enlightenment and of secular humanism in general, that no one owes obligations to a society which refuses them the right to contribute to its governance.

In a civilized society, you shouldn’t have to pray, genuflect, make pilgrimages to Mecca, recite the shahada, or go to confession. You shouldn’t have to salute the flag, say the Pledge Of Allegiance, or sing the national anthem. You shouldn’t have to publicly admire the thought of Xi Jinping, avoid expressing certain opinions, or sit still for the burning of books, heretics, or so-called enemies of the state. The relationship between individual and collective in a civilized society is reciprocal. There’s a feedback loop between the two, one governed by mutual respect. The political manifestation of this feedback loop has traditionally been called democracy.

Democracy, though, is fragile. It has many enemies, even in so-called democratic societies. More often than not, what outs these enemies is their ritual acts of public piety. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Whatever he may have intended, Kennedy’s appeal to a grandiose selflessness was in fact a radical attack on the very idea of a personal right to self-determination. You don’t have to doubt that we have both a moral and political obligation to contribute to the society which gave birth to us to find formulations like Kennedy’s of benefit principally to tyrants and sycophants.

Authoritarians love to tell us that freedom isn’t free, as though we didn’t already know that all too well. What this bumpersticker-on-the-back-of-a-pickup actually means is something more like this: When they tell you you’ve got to go somewhere and shoot people, you have to do it. Otherwise we get to spit on you.

This is the kind of freedom that a genuinely free person instinctively rejects. The real price of freedom is very different. The real price of freedom is one that no patriot, no acolyte, no devotee will ever realize that they owe, let alone be capable of paying. That their little dog knows them is good enough for them, although I doubt it’s ever been all that good for the little dog.

Singing In The Dark Times

William Timberman

Twitter. After more than a decade of contented blogging, I tried it last year, and was almost immediately chased off the premises by a persistent sociopath who needed to be there far more desperately than I did. I’d been onboard long enough, though, to realize that what made Twitter valuable was its omnipresence. It saw everything everywhere all at once, and was both faster and less timid than any curated medium was at reporting what it saw. Despite its flaws, Twitter always knew what was up, and it was always eager to tell everybody about it.

Being able to eavesdrop on the entire world in real time, or as close to real time as human perception and internet data transmission allow, is intoxicating in both the good and bad senses of the term, which is undoubtedly why Twitter can sometimes appear to us as a fountain and sometimes as a cesspool, and sometimes as both at the same time. Despite attempts by management to police vile and unpleasant behavior, there has never been any credible gatekeeper on Twitter, no credentialing, certification, or approval process that couldn’t easily be circumvented. The reason for this was the sheer scale of the task. The universe of discourse on social media in general, and on Twitter in particular, was and is too large and too fast to control, even with the assistance of computer-driven algorithms. Unlike the editors of the New York Times, Jack Dorsey and his staff had no illusions about their ability to monitor, let alone enforce, cultural norms at scale. On Twitter, civilized discourse was an option, but it was never the only option. Caveat lector was the rule.

And so it was until Musk, full of who knows what except himself, decided to cast his bread upon the waters. Given that we’re only a few days into his reign, it’s hard to predict the outcome of his dalliance with any confidence, but at the moment it seems unlikely that he’ll ever find that bread again, at least not all 44 billion dollars worth of it. What the rest of us will find is even more uncertain, but I suspect that even after Musk has done working everything over from top to bottom with his libertarian hatchet, Twitter will remain pretty much what it always has been, the human comedy entire, in all its tawdry glory. It’s also a fair bet, I think, that Musk the reformer isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and it won’t be all that surprising if, in the waning days of his epiphany, he turns out not be as solvent as he thought he was either.

All that aside, what I found useful about Twitter last year is still just as useful, and I know my way around the place now. I no longer need to browse except when the mood strikes me, I’ve found a place where the sociopaths can’t get to me, and if Elon ever tires of his pet project, or surrenders it to the bankruptcy courts, I’ll still have Mastodon, or something very like it, to fall back on. Caveat lector is working out just fine for me. YMMV.