With today’s progressives rushing to establish an automated imperium programmed with woke consciousness, the greatest peril today is not man’s barbaric inhumanity to man, which has always been with us, but a fresh horror without parallel: what Francis Fukuyama called “our posthuman future,” and C.S. Lewis called the “abolition of man.”
This is the new kind of evil empire Americans must stop today. To do so, we must travel down a path being cleared for now by President Trump, whose election forced our first big encounter with how dramatically digital life has disenchanted the one-world dream and made the “unthinkable” real. Trump’s administration will occupy only a handful of years, but his influence on the choice we must make might set us on a course of centuries.
Such a path delinks American finance, economics, and law from would-be automated imperialism. Trump’s skepticism of Silicon Valley, and his sense that government of the people and by the people must govern artificial intelligence, are essential instincts for securing the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare in a digital age.
Americanists should take heart in recalling how hard it is to force people to believe in obsolete dreams. But without clear and concerted action, that is precisely what the teched-up utopians will do.
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