Five Things: Elections, Europe, Overlords, Boss, Pretenders
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
For the last few days I have been down coughing and sneezing and finally spent all Saturday in bed. German wifes refer to this phenomenon as the “tödliche Männergrippe” - “deathly men’s cold”. But I hope that I will survive this by resting a bit more over our long weekend. Pentecost is this weekend and we have Monday off, which everybody welcomes, but I doubt hardly anyone interviewed on the street would know the significance of Pentecost to the Christians. But as long as we have yet another holiday, we are all fine with it.
My highlight of the week was of course the end of the bromance between Trump and Musk. This is highly entertaining, but certainly not something I’d like to see happening in an elected government. The ICE raids in Los Angeles were another lowpoint of this administration and I sure hope that many people finally realized what thy did when they voted for MAGA. I do like to see the Tesla share prize going down even further. Here in Germany, Tesla has a huge problem and loses market share from week to week as nobody in their right mind wants to support Musk anymore.
The new German government is four weeks in and they immedieately wanted to crack down on illegal immigration and initiated pushbacks at the borders. Even though we have open borders across most of Europe, at the German borders they had set up more border police in order to find immigrants and sent them back to were they came from before they could say “asylum”. A court already ruled this unconstitutional and three people were allowed back in to Germany. During the last electoral campaign, all these illegal immigrants coming in from other European countries to Germany, instead of staying in the other countries as they should under EU law, were supposedly causing lots of strain on the immigration system in Germany. In 4 weeks, they sent back 160 people. I am very sure that a rich country with more than 85 million people that has the third biggest economy in the world can accomodate these 160 people per month. At the same time, we need more than 400,000 immigrants per year to keep our economy going. We should finally start spending more money on the local level to integrate people quicker and get them into jobs.
Here are five great articles for you to read!
Every Election Is Now Existential
Had Trzaskowski won an additional 0.9 percent of the votes, that would not have spelled final defeat for authoritarian populism. Other narrow victories in other places don’t either. When a centrist candidate defeated an authoritarian populist in Romania a few weeks ago, some were trumpeting that as the possible start of a trend. But the same challenge will emerge in Romania during the next election too, and will once again be the defining argument of the campaign.
And that is how all elections will look, for a long time to come. Although many hoped otherwise, we do not seem to be returning to a world in which the center left and the center right compete over tax rates or budgets. Economic and policy arguments just don’t matter as much to people right now as these deeper cultural divides. That’s why all elections are now existential: Small numbers of voters swinging one way or the next will decide the nature of the state, the future of democracy, the independence of the courts.
Anne Applebaum is right, as always.
What Europe Needs to Lead
As Washington turns inward, the West is desperately searching for new leadership to uphold security and economic norms. If it plays its cards right, Europe could take on the role that the United States has abjured. Fortunately, the reforms that Europe needs to make are clear. European leaders should ramp up public investment—and coordination—on defense and strategic sectors such as critical technology. They must pass economic reforms to ensure the bloc’s long-term competitiveness. And they need to streamline decision-making on sanctions and critical aspects of trade policy.
All this is easier said than done as the EU has a decision-making process that cannot be changed just that easily.
Our Spreadsheet Overlords
Musk came to Washington promising innovation, but he is delivering a new, unaccountable form of bureaucracy. We cannot afford to continue to believe that anything that “AI” touches will be more efficient, its progress trending toward “smarter” systems. (By this point, we should know that “smart” does not mean “intelligent”; it just means “shiny.”) A general audit is a bureaucratic procedure, one that current AI is too limited to perform well. But so long as we believe the hype, it will sound like a good idea to inject AI models into the databases that contain our health insurance, our Social Security payments, and our tax records.
Among those who thought Trump would cause a constitutional crisis, few predicted it would occur in a form so boring as a spreadsheet. But the truth is that whoever controls the bureaucracy has power beyond even what a democratic process like voting can authorize or undermine. The pretense of handing that control over to the machines provides cover for an all-too-human political act: slashing and burning the federal government using a tool that has unprecedented power to do so.
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a “dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)” and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the “basic Sixties rag”, as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he’s 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden’s easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say.
I kind of regret that I didn’t get tickets for one of the shows in Germany. I have seen him live a few times and he truly is the personified America we all love.
Going to an office and pretending to work: A business that’s booming in China
For a daily fee of between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-$7), these companies offer desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, lunch, and an atmosphere that mimics any work environment. According to a report in Beijing Youth Daily, although there are no contracts or bosses, some firms simulate them: fictitious tasks are assigned and supervisory rounds are even organized. For a fee, the theatricality can reach unimaginable levels, from pretending to be a manager with his own office to staging episodes of rebellion against a superior.
This Chinese version of capitalism sure is bizarre.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico