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The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Tireless Socialist
What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.
From the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power, the tycoons, politicians, and judges formed the best-funded union in American history, a cartel that used its bottomless collective pocket to divide and conquer workers—all while promoting the myth of rugged individual success. The collusion of corporate and government interests to suppress worker power has been a constant down the decades, from Jay Gould cutting wages and firing union workers in the 1880s; to the Colorado state militia setting ablaze an encampment of strikers’ families in Ludlow in 1914, killing 11 children; and through thousands of more or less bloodily suppressed labor protests in between. Any history of socialist actions—union drives, strikes, demonstrations, political runs—is incomplete without the story of this ferocious, unequal reaction. And it’s vital for an understanding of Debs himself, of how and why a man would hurl himself time and again into the teeth of this enemy.
An elusive, often frustrating hero, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, to immigrants from Alsace in northeastern France who ran a grocery store catering to their local French community (in other words, they stocked wine). Gene, his four sisters, and baby brother were raised to be skeptical of organized religion and to question American society’s entrenched inequalities. In the overwhelmingly white Midwest of Debs’s childhood, these were primarily economic. The Civil War was a distant roar, but the downturn that followed affected the family finances enough that 14-year-old Gene quit school to work for the railroad—then barreling across the open plains, transforming remote, windswept way stations into smoke-choked cities, home to a brand-new working class.
He began by scraping the grease off the side of trains, then painting the stripes on the engines. At 16, he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal alongside the engineer driving the locomotive—sweaty, strenuous, dangerous work. He lost his job when the railroad boom of the early 1870s crashed and plunged the country into depression, but Debs still identified as a railway man. In early 1875, he became a charter member of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—a secretive, exclusive fraternity priding itself on “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” These proto-unions supported their “brothers” and families after accidents, although many workers no doubt felt like the man who said, “I would prefer my limb instead.”
As the economy continued to bubble and burst through the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the railroads across the country drew in huge numbers of workers, who knew their importance to America’s industrializing project. As an alternative to exclusive craft unions and fraternities, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, preached a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would welcome everyone, Black and white, male and female, whether they worked in fields or factories, kitchens or coal mines. The Knights emphasized community as much as battle, with picnics, dances, newspapers, and study groups. Their vision of the labor struggle as a shared, joyous culture would, in time, resonate with American socialists, but few leaders grasped how vital that joy really was.
Eugene Debs’s union activism was, by contrast, conservative and cautious. He distanced himself from the strikes that were becoming more frequent, widespread, and violent, and in 1885, at 29, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives as a Democrat. There, he fought to introduce a bill to make railroad companies liable for worker injuries, only to see it quashed by the business-friendly state Senate. Tired of the compromises, he served out his two-year term quietly, and did not seek reelection. Debs did not really want to govern; he wanted to run, and run, and run.
As his political star rose, Debs began courting Kate Metzel, a friend of his sister’s, who came from a community of politically radical German immigrants. The two married in June 1885. Their relationship rested on shared ideals, but her personality remains shadowy. Few private letters or diaries survive, although Gude suggests, fairly, that their life together did not unfold as either of them expected. They could not have children, and Kate spent much of her mature life at home in Terre Haute caring for her elderly mother and her motherless nephew. She was a rock for her husband as he roamed, but the cost to her own soul is lost to history. For Debs, home and family were “the sustaining element,” as he wrote his sister, giving him the strength to continue his work of lecturing, writing, and travel. But this rosy view ignored the widening rift between his two closest allies, Kate and his devoted younger brother, Theo, each of whom was growing increasingly jealous of the other’s influence over Debs.
His vision was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.”
Gude describes Debs’s conversion to socialism as a “transformation of the soul,” which he declared publicly on New Year’s Day 1897. He had shed the doubts and compromises of his previous organizing, given up the slow work of bargaining for scraps and winning by inches. His vision now was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.” And it was a particularly American vision. As Gude describes it, Debs’s rhetoric fused nationalist and Christian mythology with Marxism, evoking the spirit of Christ and the fire of the abolitionists. It was a brew that appealed to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of political oratory made stars of the unlikeliest speakers, whose photographs or transcripts can barely convey what felt to audiences like an electrical current. Eugene Debs would spend the rest of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, and critics and followers alike would frequently compare him to Jesus Christ.
The socialist movement Debs joined contained many factions, and plenty of leaders more pragmatic than Debs, like the more intellectual Victor Berger, who built a solid socialist base in Milwaukee, and was unafraid of compromise for the sake of gaining political power. Nobody in the Socialist Party, however, could challenge Debs’s star power. His first of five runs for president came soon after his conversion, in 1900. On a tiny budget, the candidate had to do the work single-handed, riding the rails for months at a time to lecture to audiences large and small, curious, hostile, and indifferent. In 1908, he traveled from Chicago to the West Coast in a train dubbed the “Red Special,” decked out with flags and snowing the stops with leaflets. The itinerary was relentless. A typical September morning saw him leave Des Moines, Iowa, at 6 a.m. with a schedule of four stops, and four speeches (and at least six more impromptu stops), before the train chugged into Kansas City, Missouri, in the middle of the afternoon, ahead of a speech that evening. Debs was generally blunt about his purpose: to spread the socialist gospel, not to actually make it to the White House.
In those early years of the new century, the makeup of the country’s workforce changed dramatically, and horrors of industrial labor and living conditions—especially the employment of children—became a widespread concern. Middle-class Americans began to press for regulation and government intervention, for reform within the system. To Debs’s disgust, the bombastic Teddy Roosevelt attracted their attention and votes as a Progressive, despite his coziness with big business. His popularity showed that capitalism had left behind its most rampant phase and was now having to engage in public relations.
Yet the promise of reform did little to cool labor energies in the new century. Strikes became bigger and bolder, from the mines of Minnesota to the garment factories of New York City, and the militant rhetoric of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, founded in 1905, spooked the plutocrats into fierce reprisals. For a brief moment there was an alliance, under the banner of socialism, between well-heeled, reform-minded Americans and fiery rebel workers—potently symbolized by the marriage of WASP millionaire J.G. Phelps Stokes to activist Rose Pastor, a Jewish immigrant cigar worker who became famous as the Lower East Side’s answer to Cinderella. It all pushed Debs and the socialists to the crest of a wave in 1912, the year they garnered almost a million votes for the presidency.
Debs was proud that “the Socialist Party was the first party to make the political discovery woman is a human being,” and he was a staunch supporter of women’s autonomy, from their right to vote to their freedom to access birth control. Yet he did not fully grasp the connection between capitalism and patriarchy drawn by activists like Rose Pastor Stokes, the IWW’s teenage star Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and flame-haired Kansas speaker Kate Richards O’Hare, who appear here in brief cameos. It was one thing to fight for higher wages, and quite another for those wages to depend on granting a factory foreman access to your body. (According to Gude, among the abuses that sparked a 1909 walkout at the Pressed Steel car plant in Pennsylvania was a system in which workers had to offer up their wives and daughters as bribes to keep their jobs.) Socialist feminists went further, however, in showing how sexual coercion on the job reflected patriarchal dominance in society at large. Was Debs, with his habit of visiting brothels during his long stretches living away from home, and his emotional dependence on women who were not his wife, really capable of understanding what socialism meant to women? How far was he willing to share power with them—or anyone?
Early in his career, Debs moved cautiously on what was known as the “race question,” seeing it, as many Northerners did, as a Southern problem, and one that class solidarity would in time solve naturally. But the brutalities of Jim Crow disillusioned him, and by the time The Birth of a Nation was enthralling white audiences across the country in 1915, he was spitting blood. In a letter protesting the film’s racist distortions of history, he went so far as to call out the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, writing that, if truly told, Black history “would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning” than those in the film. His outrage was so rare that it was reprinted in a number of Black newspapers, and put him in contact with the rising new generation of “New Negro” activists in Harlem. Gude argues persuasively that this is where the energy and the optimism of socialism migrated after Debs’s death, smack in the middle of the rip-roaring capitalist ’20s—to Harlem, and then into the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Debs understood capitalism as a scourge that reached beyond America’s borders. He railed against U.S. empire-building and warmongering abroad, whether in Cuba in 1898 or in Mexico in 1914, when President Wilson sent troops, as Debs put it, to die “fighting for Rockefeller and his class.” That was April. By late summer, what was then called the European War had engulfed the foreign policy agenda. Debs joined the chorus protesting “preparedness,” the military buildup that was the pet cause of his old adversary Teddy Roosevelt. But when Wilson, reelected as the peace candidate in 1916, swept the United States into the war the following spring, the repercussions for protesters and leftists were immediate, and crushing. The Espionage Act criminalized dissent, while vigilantes calling themselves the American Protective League hauled off suspected draft dodgers in unmarked vans. The battered IWW was broken, and the thriving socialist press abruptly silenced.
In June 1918, Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, in defense of socialism. He denounced war in general as a tool of the oppressors, and urged the crowd to remember that they were human beings, with minds and souls to develop, not wage slaves or cannon fodder. Two weeks later, the 62-year-old was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1920, two years after the end of the war, he mounted his fifth and final presidential run from his Atlanta prison cell. After President Harding commuted his sentence the day before Christmas in 1921, Debs used his experience of incarceration to write about the horrors of the prison system, especially the way it robbed poor Black boys of their future. But his health was shot, and less than five years after his release, America’s leading socialist died at the age of 70.
Almost immediately, arguments over his legacy began. His ability to inspire listeners in every corner of the country, to connect and convince them that he cared about them and had a balm for their pain, was powerful, but fundamentally at odds with the movement’s democratic ethos. Debs himself worried that socialism could not grow by following a powerful leader, but at the same time he wasn’t willing to give up the spotlight. There was always another audience.
Gude grapples throughout his book with this contradiction in Debs, the grandiose visionary and the man who craved constant affirmation, and whose heavy drinking at times meant that he needed a junior party member to get him to the stage on time. After a failed run for Congress in 1916, he plunged into an emotional affair with a married woman several years his junior, with whom he exchanged passionate letters up until the end of his life. In his final years, he embraced alternative health therapies and wrote enthusiastically to his brother from one sanitarium of the powers of such wellness cures as cold plunges, touching grass, and avoiding processed foods. These human peculiarities of Debs resist a clear narrative, and apparently did nothing to undermine his followers’ faith. He didn’t connect with people by confessing his own failings, but clearly his flaws helped him toward his spirit of nonjudgmental humanism, which allowed him to meet his fellow human beings where and how they were.
For all his wide knowledge across the vast range of American working lives, Eugene Debs was a Midwesterner at heart, and his politics belonged to Terre Haute, a small town under a big sky, rather than socialism’s urban hotbeds, Chicago or New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York isn’t explained by Debs, although he quoted him in his inauguration speech (“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity”). There’s perhaps a more pertinent line of inheritance from the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee, who proudly got their name by installing a sewer system in the sanitation-deprived town, to Mamdani’s equally unglamorous, useful project of filling potholes across the city. Action, not oratory.
The international socialists who inspired Debs at the start of his conversion were wildly excited at the prospects for American labor. How far might a nation go that had no kings to depose, no entrenched hierarchies to uproot, a country so young and iconoclastic and resource-rich? It was a disillusion as brutal as the mines and the mills, to see how powerful the pushback would be. The promise of American socialism is still unfulfilled, but this is a country in which almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Even politics. Even capitalism. Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.
The Return of the Brazilian Far Right Is a Climate Catastrophe
On October 25, Brazilians will vote in the second round of their presidential elections. The matter might not be all that suspenseful. The far right-wing candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is widely favored to defeat the incumbent, President Lula da Silva, especially after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round, which found both him and the members of his far-right movement broadly in the ascendance. His victory will be a catastrophe for many reasons, but there’s one looming disaster that will extend far beyond Brazil’s borders: The fate of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, hangs in the balance. Its stepped-up destruction will likely dramatically accelerate global warming.
What’s more, Donald Trump has personal ties to one of the Brazilian oligarchs who is most directly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon, and Trump actually hosted him in the White House on August 20.
And yet the mainstream U.S. media is ignoring the rising danger to the Amazon. Ominously, climate scientists have warned that increased destruction will push the vast rainforest toward a “tipping point,” after which recovery will be difficult, if not impossible.
Here, briefly, is the science behind the warnings. The Amazon rainforest is our planet’s biggest carbon sink. Its 2.3 million square miles of thick vegetation pull dangerous carbon dioxide from the global atmosphere, and safely store it in the forest’s thick vegetation. Burn the forest, and carbon dioxide, the worst of the greenhouse gases, remains in the atmosphere, damaging the climate everywhere on the planet.
In recent years, climate scientists point out that some 17 percent of the Amazon has already been burned or otherwise destroyed. Estimates are that 20 to 25 percent would be the tipping point, after which the end result will be treeless savannah and scrubland. Naturally, these predictions are not facts, but as Thomas Lovejoy, the great American scientist and environmentalist who devoted his life to the Amazon, used to say, “Multiply the risk of a catastrophe by its disastrous consequences, and you will see that inaction is impossible.”
Once you witness the aftermath of the rainforest destruction, you will never forget it. Take, for instance, the construction of BR-317, the two-lane highway that runs southwest from the city of Rio Branco in Brazil’s western state of Acre to the Bolivian border. Once, triple-canopy forest reached right to the highway’s edge on both sides. Now, green pasture stretches into the far distance, with occasional dead tree trunks and blackened stumps a reminder of what happened. Once, you would have struggled to peer more than 50 feet into the forest. Now, you can see for miles.
These days, huge herds of dewlapped, humped, white Brahma cattle roam across the huge fazendas, or ranches. Patches of sickly orange-brown soil are the giveaway; the topsoil is actually shallow and not fertile. In the rainforest, falling vegetation from the thick forest cover is regularly recycled into new forest growth. Destroy the original dense tree cover, and the rainforest dies.
Of course, along highway BR-317, the rainforest’s rich and interdependent insect, bird, and animal life has also retreated into the far horizons. From time to time, you might see a couple of parrots; they sometimes fly in matrimonial pairs. On a rare occasion, you might catch sight of a dazzlingly blue morpho butterfly dancing along the highway. But the life form you are most likely to notice is gray-headed vultures.
Xapuri, a small town along the highway, was once the home to Chico Mendes, the legendary environmentalist and rubber-tapper leader who was murdered back in 1988. The local ranchers who later burned the forest killed him first, to get him out of the way. Several books have been written about his life; he is also the subject of an excellent feature film.
Destroying the trees to create pasture for beef cattle is one of the main reasons the rainforest is dying, and powerful cattle ranchers are one of the major supporters of the far right in Brazil. Flávio Bolsonaro, the current candidate, is a stand-in for his father, Jair, who was president from 2018 to 2022 (and is presently in prison for plotting to overthrow the incumbent president, Lula da Silva, who defeated him in the 2022 election). Under the elder Bolsonaro, rainforest destruction had accelerated dramatically, as the fazendeiros, or large-scale ranchers, had demanded. After Lula won, the burning dropped 34 percent in his first six months in office.
Another contributor to rainforest destruction is JBS, the gigantic global foods company that originally started in Brazil but which has now expanded, including into the United States. JBS is the world’s largest meat-processing company. Environmentalists and others have credibly accused it of exporting meat from Brazilian pastures that replaced stretches of burned-out rainforest. JBS denies the allegations, but Senator Ron Wyden held a series of hearings from 2021 to 2023, and he concluded that JBS “was turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers who play by the rules on international trade.” Human Rights Watch also reported in 2025 that JBS “may have exported beef ... sourced from illegal ranches.”
It was one of the principal owners of JBS, Joesley Batista, who met Donald Trump face to face in the White House on August 20. Batista apparently successfully lobbied Trump to lower U.S. tariffs on imported Brazilian beef, in an effort to reduce consumer prices in the United States. But you can bet that Trump never raised the fate of the Amazon—nor will he, if Flávio Bolsonaro wins on October 25.
Defending the Amazon rainforest is a dangerous business, and the killing didn’t stop with Chico Mendes. A 2022 report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists had been murdered in the previous decade across the global south. Brazil was in first place, with 342 killings. Indigenous people are among the victims. A remarkable 2022 film, The Territory, actually documented one such murder.
Cattle ranches are not the only threat to the Amazon. High global gold prices have stimulated feverish efforts to invade the forest, as Amazon Watch, the influential U.S.-based environmentalist organization, warned last May. Large mining corporations, and the individual artisanal miners called garimpeiros, are both to blame. Amazon Watch indicted “a predatory logic that turns rivers into sludge, strengthens illegal networks, and deepens violence.”
There is unfortunately yet another threat. Rising global demand for soybeans is also triggering rainforest destruction.
Under President Lula, a Brazilian government agency called IBAMA fought hard to protect the forest. IBAMA agents are authorized to carry weapons, and they do often get into gunfights with forest destroyers. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins, he and his allies in the Brazilian Congress, which will be dominated by the far right, will surely neuter the agency. What’s more, for now the Brazilian Constitution bans industrial mining in Indigenous territories. But the fear is that the incoming far-right majority will change the law.
Amazon Watch’s program director is Christian Poirier. His organization, like the others in the global environmental movement, regards the news from Brazil as a true climate emergency: “The Trump administration is openly sympathetic to the Bolsonaros, and has been working to subvert and interfere in Brazil’s election. We need to vote in a Democratic Congress in November, and then push it to put the brakes on Trump’s pro-Bolsonaro, anti-rainforest moves.”
Andrew Miller is Amazon Watch’s advocacy director, in Washington, D.C. He recognizes that certain progressive members of Congress, like Representatives Delia Ramirez and Mark Pocan, are already taking a direct interest in the Brazil environmental crisis. But he warns that Congress is also afflicted by what is called “climate hushing.”
“It’s crazy,” he says. “Studies show a measurable decline in the number of press releases and public statements about the environment coming out of Congress. The number of congressional interventions on the climate is decreasing—at a time when the actual global crisis is greater than ever, and growing.”
The Sudden Return of Effective Altruism
After briefly fading into the background following the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX under the weight of its own accounting fraud, effective altruism, or E.A., is back in the news in a big way. This time, the philosophy’s adherents have found themselves in a sudden-onset blood feud with the Trump White House. Given the administration’s unceasing hostility to both effectiveness and altruism, the spat has a certain intuitiveness to it, but this conflict is not driven by Trump’s hatred of the global poor. Instead, it was the Department of Defense posting, seemingly unprompted, a pronouncement of “Americanism, not Effective Altruism” that ignited the conflict. Since then, there has been a major struggle over “AI safety” policy between E.A. adherents and the techno-fascist right—two groups that do, confusingly, overlap as well.
It’s hard to remember as the world burns around us, but there was a moment when E.A. (and its sister philosophies rationalism and longtermism) was ascendent. It was quickly amassing capital, adherents, and political power. In just a few short years, it went from a few quirky thinkers and writers trying to logic their way to solving morality to a coalition with substantial financial, media, and lobbying capacity.
While Bankman-Fried may have become effective altruism’s most notorious adherent, he was far from alone. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn remain firmly in the E.A. camp, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both publicly embraced and funded parts of the movement (although their overall giving doesn’t graft as cleanly onto the philosophy). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has also described his approach to philanthropy similarly to E.A.
That ascendence was, in no small part, fueled by Silicon Valley titans’ patronage and proselytization. And a key reason for that is that the central premise of (especially longtermist) E.A. is just a hop, skip, and a jump from a moral permission structure that nakedly celebrates wealth and excuses opulence as steps on the path to a more just future. Bankman-Fried himself admitted as much in a candid exchange with a journalist after his business empire imploded; the altruism he championed was all about cloaking the scramble for wealth and power as something noble.
This is in no way true of everyone who takes interest in or subscribes to E.A., and it’s important to remember that those who are able to season their effective altruism with a dose of epistemic humility do often fund worthy projects. But the totalizing moral structure that shields the machinations of the powerful is a crucial dynamic to make sense of how we got to our current political moment, with tech oligarchs running amok, major financial realignment, and all-encompassing AI storylines. Because while the impulse to do altruism, and make it effective, can help galvanize works rooted in good intentions, our would-be overlords took that to start paving the proverbial road to hell.
At its core, effective altruism posits that, given scarce resources, the most ethical course of action is the one that maximizes the “returns” that can be generated from those scarce resources. Usually, the “returns” in question are measured in things like lives saved, disease incidences avoided, people educated, or other noble goals. But the returns can also be monetary, which is part of why E.A. is extremely useful to the ultrarich seeking to amass power.
The obvious assumption here is that there is an objective way of accounting for those returns and an objective way to “weight” doing good that benefits different people. One of the more common instincts among effective altruists is to consider all human lives equal. On its face, that sounds obviously correct! But it can quickly lead to counterintuitive conclusions.
Take for instance a charity that runs a program integrating ex-cons into communities’ workforces at an expense of $10,000 per week. An E.A.-style analysis could take this program and compare it to a famously cost-effective intervention like bed nets to fight malaria and mosquito-borne disease—which costs around $2 to $5 per net and can save a child’s life for every 600 nets distributed—and conclude that this facially worthy cause is actually bleeding resources away from more effective forms of altruistic intervention. And in that framework, career development to integrate people back into their communities is not only suboptimally moral but could even be immoral because that work takes on the opportunity cost of children’s lives. In the hypothetical above, that $10,000 a week could instead be spent on malaria nets and save as many as eight lives a week.
So, to a stickler E.A. analysis, community service missions can be actively harmful because it would be more moral to spend the money elsewhere. This sort of thinking is not universal among the movement’s adherents; it is entirely possible to recognize the limits of this economics-style optimization problem as a philosophy. But when that possibility is pushed out of mind, or actively attacked, such analysis can rapidly lead to some very unsavory moral positions.
Take, for instance, Sam Bankman-Fried, who subscribed to the E.A. movement’s more radical offshoot, longtermism. In SBF’s mind, spending a dollar to help save a life today would be a waste when that dollar could instead be invested in the development of new technologies that could theoretically save thousands or millions of lives in the distant future. With enough navel-gazing, SBF appears to have convinced himself that a utilitarian course of action could include purchasing the island-nation of Nauru and setting it up as a doomsday bunker from which a select few effective altruists could repopulate the planet after an apocalyptic scenario. Deranged, eugenic, and laughable, you might say, but if you give an insular group of E.A.s enough time and space to stew in their own juices, just about anything can seem rational.
Think back to the fundamental idea that we can objectively decide how much to “weight” the good done to different individuals. Any attempt to refine such an analysis runs into the problem that the “solution” to your optimization problem will be different depending on how weights are assigned. And you can get better results if you prioritize certain subpopulations. For example, if you have limited funding for cancer research, you will get wildly different resource allocations depending on if you weight each life the same versus if you prioritize maximizing years lived post-treatment. If everyone counts the same, there will be comparatively more funding flowing toward cancers that impact older adults. If we weight by years of life post-treatment, the focus will be much more on pediatric cancer.
Naturally, either of those is colorably better than the current market-based approach to research and development that sees more investment in erectile dysfunction treatment than, say, endometriosis. But if it feels a little gross to be pitting different communities of cancer patients against each other, that’s because it is. It is also necessitated by any system that purports to “solve” moral quandaries. And it feeds into the more unsavory tendencies among E.A.s.
There are broadly three buckets of destructive ways of thinking that effective altruists are predisposed toward, all downstream of this necessity to determine the relative moral worth of helping different populations with a fixed pool of resources: deference to notions of a chosen elite, justification of the centralization of power and wealth, and wanton disregard for human well-being and agency.
It’s here that I have to introduce you to Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI theorist, Peter Thiel associate, Harry Potter fanfic writer, and movement figurehead. Yudkowsky, often referred to simply as “Yud” by those in the know of AI research and E.A. thought, views himself in a messianic light, to the point that when one supporter (Scott Alexander, an E.A./rationalist thought leader in his own right) tweeted a comparison of him to Jesus Christ, he responded with a hypothetical conversation where he condescends to the Lamb of God. If you have developed and propagated a moral framework that is objectively more correct than the Son of God, though, it follows that you have the moral high ground, elevated well above that puny peak at Mount Sinai where Moses received his ethical framework.
Yudkowsky’s epic screed, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, is a common entry point to the world of rationalist and E.A. thought, and has been deployed as a recruiting tool to bring new people into the movement. At more than 600,000 words across 122 chapters, the alternate Harry Potter story, doled out in pieces over five years, follows the titular character as he uses rationalist thinking to engineer new types of magic, wielding his upbringing by an Oxford philosopher to demonstrate the power of rational thought. Arthur C. Clarke famously posited that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; Yudkowsky’s take is basically that sufficiently rational thought will enable the creation of technology that functionally is magic.
This messianic sense of self is not confined to Yudkowsky. One of the most long-standing critiques of the broader E.A. space is that it insists on totalizing and moralizing across every part of life to insist that there is an objectively correct way to live. And that people who don’t follow that path are hence wrong.
Australian philosopher Peter Singer, one of the ethical pioneers of E.A. thought, gave a TED Talk in which he argued that a blind American should not be given a guide dog through philanthropy, because it uses funds that could have a much greater impact in treating blindness in developing countries. Similarly, philosopher Eric Friedman wrote that he would be “angry” at people donating to St. Jude, the pediatric cancer treatment hospital, when the same money could go further if it were diverted to a different pediatric cancer center (again in the developing world).
And while St. Jude does have its own issues with arguably bloated overhead and advertising costs, this mode of analysis would say that you shouldn’t fund any pediatric cancer wards in rich countries as long as there is a more cost-effective alternative elsewhere in the world. Remember earlier, when pitting cancer patients against each other felt like a reach? Some people actually do that. The end point of all of this is that unless you are the objectively most worthy of help, any assistance given to you is not just suboptimal but deeply immoral.
To a certain cadre of extremist, egomaniacal E.A.s, their vaunted ability to be the only ones capable of clearly seeing these trade-offs is reason enough for them to be a chosen elite. They need to lead because most people don’t have the stomach to come out and say that children in rich countries don’t deserve help with their cancer. Instead, only this group has the right combination of intelligence and objectivity to usher society into the future. And here is the juncture where some E.A.s go down the road of eugenics, believing that the intentional breeding of humans for desirable traits gets a bad rap. Incidentally, people who follow the tenets of effective altruism and rationalism just happen to have the traits for which they want to select. For some, their superiority is not just intellectual but biological. Which leads to dabbling in long-discredited race science and writing off entire populations.
This innate superiority feeds directly into the second set of dangerous thinking endemic to certain corners of E.A.: the justification of massive concentration of wealth and power. If some people are just better leaders because they are smarter and more objective, then it is preferable for those people to control resources and direct decision-making. This is, as University of Chicago philosopher Brian Leiter noted to the New York Post, part of why tech titans love E.A.; “There’s no talk about higher taxes, redistribution to a more progressive income tax, anti-trust investigations or more regulation of their businesses.” In fact, tax-based redistribution could actually be worse for society if it takes money away from the altruists who could steer it toward worthy causes more efficiently.
This exact problem is compounded by “longtermism.” Recall that the central premise of E.A. charitable calculus is that we can do the most good by being agnostic about how near or distant a person is; the entire idea is to weight only by who is most deserving and would make greatest use of the help. Longtermism extends this line of thinking into a fourth dimension: time.
If good deeds done in an indeterminate future time frame could be just—or more—ethical than anything done now, then there is a point at which amassing wealth now to spend later can be presented as more useful than just doing good things now. This is the justification of the “earn to give” mentality modeled by Sam Bankman-Fried. He had to get filthy rich, you see, because then he can take all that money and better the world on the back end.
Vanilla E.A. already teaches that we should set aside our own personal relationships and care about people regardless of where they are. Longtermism says that we also have to care equally about when people are. And there is practically no level of disempowerment or disinvestment that cannot be justified when you are weighting eight-odd billion lives against a theoretically infinite number of people who might exist in the future.
Here’s where the wanton negligence toward humanity can kick in. Once you break down the social bonds built by relationship and community first and foremost to the people closest to us, it’s much easier to reduce human life to an abstract agglomeration of discrete beings that exist outside of the world as we know it. Suddenly, the inclination to be willing to burn the Earth to fuel space colonization makes a lot more sense. You might doom most of the population in the near future, but there is infinitely more net utility once the entire galaxy’s resources are able to be tapped to fuel future lives. This is basically an argument Elon Musk, noted fan of E.A. gospel What We Owe the Future, has been making for years.
Moreover, once you divorce ethics and altruism from the social and communal relationships that they’re traditionally grounded in, you move away from a focus on channeling resources toward helping living breathing people. Instead, you can justify takes that, actually, insects are more important to help because they have some form of consciousness and vastly outnumber us. The least extreme iteration of this is animal welfare and veganism activism that comes out of E.A. spaces, pushing for greater acceptance of animals as beings worthy of altruistic treatment as well. The most extreme is intertwined with frontier AI development’s quest to create new artificial beings. That version is the crucial evolution of Elon Musk’s older take about space colonization. Our species is just a biological “bootloader” for a one-day interstellar artificial superintelligence.
It is easy to see how noble intent can pave the way to these outlandish ethical positions. We probably should care more about the way we treat animals. But that doesn’t mean that choosing to fund a program to help children orphaned by natural disasters is unethical because the money would be more effectively spent preserving ant colonies. The reason why we intuitively help the people closest to us is not just an ethical lapse, it’s because we have different moral responsibilities depending on how we relate to people.
Maybe AI will become conscious and colonize distant stars. But it is the height of ego and folly to predict that it necessarily will happen and that, therefore, we need to prioritize our potential robotic progeny over the people around us in the here and now.
Not all, or even most, people who dabble in E.A. thought fall into these moral traps, but it’s common enough that there are observable patterns of behavior. More importantly, the people who do fall into these tendencies seem determined to engineer the end of the world as we know it.
Effective altruism prides itself on being nonconformist and willing to break with public opinion. Many of its adherents seemingly relish being outside the mainstream. It legitimates their view that they are apart from “normies” who are shepherded towards rote philosophical positions.
That’s how you wind up with Yudkowsky being spoken of in the same breath as someone in a “sex cult” and an important thought leader in AI alignment.
Some expat critics of E.A. who left the movement have a different acronym: TESCREAL, or transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. Basically, the argument is that Silicon Valley has been taken in by a compulsion to strive for biologically evolving beyond the current nature of the human race (transhumanism plus extropianism), achieving a technological innovation that renders previous human ways of life obsolete and results in integrating humanity with machines (the singularity), the achievement of immortality through consciousness transfers (cosmism), improving human decision-making by centering objectivity (rationalism), and that we have an ethical responsibility to deploy resources in the way most likely to do the most good (E.A.), not just for the people who exist but for those who could exist in the future, as well (longtermism).
The TESCREAL argument lays out the case that much of the tech world has become dedicated to obsessive focus on the potential of human extinction and the necessity of achieving a science fiction–esque future.
The business plan here will look familiar to anyone who has tracked the promises figures like Sam Altman have continually made. Promise that technology is being developed that will fundamentally change life for the better, cure cancer, and usher in a post-scarcity society. In the meantime, build up huge reserves of money and political power. And then justify the costs being borne in the deployment of technology as a necessary evil to usher in a brighter future.
The entire E.A. worldview has been a microcosm of Silicon Valley’s political framework, which is why it was so expedient for figures like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz to promote it. Bundled into a single philosophy, you have the groundwork to validate elites’ self-importance, justify the amassing of power and wealth, and excuse nearly any antisocial behavior through commitments to the future.
To the powerful people who invested in spreading the gospel of effective altruist thought, these quirks are features, not bugs. A philosophy that confirms that those wielding power and resources are actually heroes fighting a cosmic battle for the future allows for oligarchs to justify the undermining of democratic institutions, the hoarding of wealth, and callous treatment of humanity.
One last time, it’s worth bearing in mind that this mentality is not universalizable across everyone who finds E.A. to be valuable. Initiatives like Giving What We Can are a way for people to genuinely put their money where their mouths are. For plenty of people, the weird, deeply anti-human takes are a bridge farther than they’ll ever take the philosophy. But for Silicon Valley titans, these predilections are a crucial element of why they find this worldview to be useful—to their own ends, at least.
Once you have a framework that validates your role as the builders of a new, better world, it justifies serving as pallbearers of what we currently know as human civilization. And once you accept that your movement is an elite that must be nurtured into stewards of the future and that this destiny is more important than anything else in the present, it becomes totally reasonable to do things like buy castles for your thinkers’ enrichment.
Now we’re at a juncture where the people who helped effective altruism make it big, people like Musk, are in conflict with the elements of the movement who have kept out of the worst rabbit holes. Some see the singularity as inevitable, and creating artificial consciousness as an ethical imperative. Some see real people as being worth helping. When your philosophy lionizes elites and excuses their greed, of course they’ll help fund it. But now the chickens are coming home to roost, and it’s becoming more apparent that the indulgence of power is the reason those people were on board in the first place. Their altruism is devoted purely to laying claim to a future that merely aligns with their own desires.
If the Nidal Hasan Execution Is Livestreamed, We Are a Barbaric Nation
Very early on the morning of August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea woke up for the last time. He was a young Black man—Wikipedia pegs his age at the time at 27, while another more authoritative-seeming source I read said he was 22—who had lost his mother and father while young and drifted into a life of itinerant labor and, eventually, crime. Earlier that summer, he broke into the home of 70-year-old Lishia Edwards, who was white. He raped her and killed her and stole some of her jewelry. Or at least it seems like he did—he confessed more than once, but never in the presence of counsel, and at one point he told police he was drunk at the time of his first confession. But a ring was found at the scene that did belong to him.
His execution, by hanging, was set for sunrise that mid-August day. A crowd of 20,000 gathered; vendors sold candy, popcorn, Coca-Cola, and watermelon; some men climbed utility poles, and parents held their small children aloft, for a better view. The Louisville Courier-Journal enthused: “Kentucky is already famous for her hospitality. Her Derby parties are known all over the country. Her hanging parties should have an even wider fame. Most people are interested in horse-racing, but all people are interested in death.”
Coverage was national and intense. The Northern papers were horrified by this macabre spectacle (here’s a photo of the scene). The people of Owensboro resented the way they were portrayed. But the state legislature and the governor had enough of a conscience that not long after, they passed a law outlawing public executions. And the hanging of Rainey Bethea was, by most accounts, the last public execution in the United States (the Death Penalty Information Center’s website says that one more took place, in Missouri in 1937).
In either case, it’s been nine decades, nearly a century, since the United States of America or any of its states decided that turning the killing of a human being into a public entertainment was a good idea. France banned the practice soon thereafter, in 1939. In the UK, public execution was outlawed back in 1868. In 2025, according to Amnesty International, just two countries carried out public executions. The theocrats in Iran held 11, and the Taliban in Afghanistan hosted six. And that’s the company in which Pete Hegseth—the testosterone-obsessed, man-boy “war” secretary—wishes to place the United States of America.
Donald Trump has done a lot of repulsive things as president and taken this country down moral sinkholes most of us never thought we’d encounter. But if he approves the livestreaming of the execution of Nidal Hasan—and Hegseth’s announcement last week was just a recommendation; Trump said over the weekend that he will decide—it will easily be the most depraved thing he’s done.
Hasan’s crimes are sickening. He killed 13 people, including a pregnant woman, and injured 32 more when he opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. I’m an opponent of the death penalty, mainly because there’s just way too much evidence that our justice system wrongly convicts people. Since 1972, 203 people sentenced to death in this country have been later exonerated. I’ll admit, though, that in cases of premeditated mass murder like this one, where the crime was unspeakable and the guilt is clear, I don’t lose much sleep when I learn that the perp will be put to death.
But televising it is barbaric. Turning the killing of a human being, any human being, into a spectator sport is about as sick as it gets. The United States of the mid-1930s was not exactly a progressive Eden, to say nothing of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A Black man was lynched in the state just two years before Bethea was put to death. But even in that place and at that time, people in positions of power knew that killing a person for public amusement was one moral bridge too far and moved to outlaw it.
It’s not too far for Hegseth. The man who has overseen a disastrous war that has cost you and me $45 billion and 81 aircraft worth more than $3 billion thinks it’s a grand idea. He laid it out last week to some right-wing “news” outfit called Real America’s Voice. A “no-brainer,” he said. “It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kinda like the mentality we had in World War II. Which was win.”
Where does one even begin? As if turning murder into a piece of theater is on par with the global fight to stop fascism. As if taking a human life on TV is a “win” comparable to the defeat of Hitler. What kind of monster talks like this?
At another point in the interview, Hegseth gave away what really makes people like him seethe. Of Hasan’s act, he said: “Remember what Obama called it? ‘Workplace violence’? I mean, that’s what we’re up against.” Wow. Did Obama really say that? “Workplace violence” is Andy Bernard punching a wall, not a religious extremist executing 13 innocent people and perpetrating a bloodbath.
But Obama never personally uttered the phrase. In the shootings’ immediate aftermath, he called them a “horrific outburst of violence.” Instead, the Pentagon categorized Hasan’s act as an incident of workplace violence until it much later decided to call it what it obviously was, an act of terrorism (Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire). So that’s what’s eating at Hegseth here—that a Pentagon full of beardos and weirdos, no doubt acting at the behest of a commander-in-chief who would never meet Hegseth’s perverse definition of manhood, was engaged in a bunch of low-testosterone wokery until he came along.
One can agree with Hegseth on that score that if one wishes. But it doesn’t excuse, nothing excuses, livestreaming the event. It still may not happen. JD Vance threw a little cold water on the idea over the weekend, announcing that it wasn’t a done deal and in any case he wouldn’t be watching. Trump, in his remarks, left the door open for an about face.
If it does happen, though: Can there be any doubt there will be watch parties—mini-Owensboros, so to speak—all over the country, or at least certain parts of it? And remember: This will take place on December 3, during the first week of Advent, in between the Sundays dedicated to Hope and Peace.
I wonder what Hegseth—who fancies himself a devout Christian and sports a tattoo saying “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), which was a rallying cry among the Christian crusaders massacring Muslims—makes of that little piece of irony. Or the irony that adheres in the fact that he wants to punish an Islamic religious extremist by doing something that will link the United States of America arm-in-arm with what are almost surely the two most extremist theocratic Islamic regimes in the world. One doubts that irony has occurred to him. And of course it will elude Trump. Our hope is that one of those plastic-faced denizens of Mar-a-Lago might point it out to him in time. And if not, December 3 will take its place as one of the darkest days in modern American history.
Crimson Roars in the Redwoods
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