The opening sentence of George Packer’s sobering new essay in The Atlantic : “We are living in an authoritarian state.” After detailing “the features of the modern authoritarian state,” he writes: “Every one of them exists today in this country.”

Packer devotes most of the essay on the point that democracy depends on “the ‘mores’ of its people … Tocqueville called their ‘habits of the heart.’ I don’t disagree with this. But Packer appears to despair of an institutional reform that would ameliorate the situation. In any event, he doesn’t discuss any except to rightly reject as fundamentally antithetical to democracy the idea entertained by Joe Rogan and Sam Altman of “an AI president” who “would be able to talk to everyone, understand them deeply, and then ‘optimize for the collective

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