Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 47
December 22, 2017
‘Trump White House ‘Threatening The Very Foundation Of This Republic’ | Wbur Radio | Dec 20th, 2017
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Former world chess champion and Russian pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) joins Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson to discuss the first year of the Trump presidency.
Kasparov is warning Americans not to let President Trump turn the U.S. into Russia, which Kasparov sees as profoundly undemocratic under President Vladimir Putin:
We chose wrong and failed democracy in Russia. We failed by choosing a man, even a decent man, Yeltsin, over strong democratic institutions. We paid for it with Putin, and are still paying for it, as is everyone else.
@Kasparov63
Even if you like Trump, or tolerate him for what you think he can do for you or your cause, you are choosing against those American institutions. If you think they are broken, fix them, don’t help Trump destroy them. Choose.
3:00 PM – Dec 17, 2017
Interview Highlights
On problems he sees being generated by the Trump White House
“I think we should look at Trump’s criticism — not against individuals, that’s in bad taste — but against institutions. And that’s the playbook of every would-be dictator. And Trump is very consistent in his attacks against U.S. institutions, U.S. electoral system, free press, now law enforcement. And it’s worrisome because that’s what every dictator did starting his campaign on destroying the pillars of democracy.”
On there being a difference between calling something “fake news” and jailing journalists
“That’s why I say, it’s still a long way to go. And I don’t think we’ll ever see the same problems here as we’re seeing in Russia, or in other authoritarian and totalitarian countries. But you’d better be aware that such dangers do exist, and the fact is that, within a year — probably we can say more than a year, adding up the time Donald Trump has spent in his campaign going after U.S. institutions — he did a very good job by swaying a big chunk of Americans, 25, 30 percent, with him to believe that there is a deep state, and institutions that are not doing a good job. And I think the fact is that many people are just losing their faith in the FBI, in other law enforcement offices, in the free press. They buy the concept of ‘fake news’ and deep state. That’s a big success for Vladimir Putin, because all Putin wanted [was] to discredit democracy as an institution, and the fact is that now American democracy … it’s not in jeopardy, but it’s kind of in the gray area, where people have doubts about the way these institutions are functioning. That’s troubling for me.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever see the same problems here as we’re seeing in Russia, or in other authoritarian and totalitarian countries. But you’d better be aware that such dangers do exist.”
Garry Kasparov
On key differences between Trump and Putin
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“Trump is still the president of the United States. It’s a democracy. He was elected. Like him or not, he was elected by the law of the land. Vladimir Putin’s election was a charade from day one. It was all known in advance. And so that’s why when Vladimir Putin now is heading for a new election campaign, it’s rather a reappointment than a re-election. But no doubt that Trump envies Putin and other authoritarian leaders and dictators in the world, because Trump definitely wants to have the same uncontrolled power, and Vladimir Putin, as an experienced KGB agent, knows how to play with the weaknesses of his counterparts.”
On whether he sees the Trump-Putin dynamic through the lens of a chess master
“I have to say that, from my perspective, 2017 was not a bad year, because many Americans realize how dangerous the situation, how fragile the situation was. But we’re just in the beginning, or maybe I would say in the middle game, if I use chess terminology. Because recognizing the threat, it’s a first step, but you have to come up with a strategy, and it seems to me that strategy is not there, and it’s just the beginning of the debate about the strategy. And that’s the way to deal with dictators, because if you tried to play a sharp tactical game, it’s a very short-term game. With a dictator you will lose, since a dictator is not limited in his actions by public opinion, parliamentary investigations, free press. The only way to counter these kind of activities, clandestine operations against you run by dictatorships, is to come up with a strategy. It’s a long view to guarantee that the advantages of democracy will eventually prevail. But that means we need politicians, rather, not politicians, but statesmen, who will look beyond their term in the office. And so far I see very little of this in this country or in Europe.”
On saying a woman could be a world chess champion, when he didn’t think so before
“Look, things are just changing everywhere. And obviously the gap between female and male players is not as great as it was 30 years ago. It’s still there, so there’s I think the one female player, the strongest one, Hou Yifan from China, she’s making the top 100. But we had also an example of the great Judit Polgár, the Hungarian player, she was at one point top 10. So that’s why there’s nothing that precludes female players of climbing higher. It may take longer than people want, but the trend is inevitable. And as everywhere else, we could see more and more female players competing on equal terms with their male competitors.”
On what he wants to teach people through his online chess course
“It’s not just teaching. It’s more like sharing my passion and love for the game of chess. Because even in seven hours, you cannot teach people how to play chess. It’s not about giving information, it’s about inside an inspiration. Those are the most important things a teacher can provide a student. And I prepared this curriculum, and of course it includes tactics and strategy and many useful advices. But at the end of the day, it’s for students to get more excited about it, and to see the beauty of the game, to enjoy these ‘ah’ moments where they could solve the story and just to be so proud about their ability to move one step further in their understanding of this great game.”
This segment aired on December 20, 2017.
December 14, 2017
December 8, 2017
Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara | Dec 6th, 2017
“Thanks to Preet Bharara for having me on his podcast to talk about Putin’s Russia, the Trump admin, and even a little chess! There are many links, including NPR and iTunes. https://t.co/cPEmhZTRM8 “
– Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63)
Here’s the latest episode. Hear chess great Garry Kasparov’s thoughts on Russia, the nature of truth and Michael Flynn. https://t.co/fQhgaNiYZ6
— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) December 7, 2017
November 26, 2017
Politico Podcast: Off Message with Edward-Isaac Dovere | November 21, 2017
ORIGINAL PODCAST / ARTICLE AT POLITICO.COM
Subscribe to Off Message on Apple Podcasts here. | Subscribe via Stitcher here.
Subscribe to Off Message on Apple Podcasts here. | Subscribe via Stitcher here.
Chess? That’s not what Garry Kasparov sees Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin playing—three-dimensional or any other kind. But if they did sit down for a game, the former grandmaster believes the Russian president would obviously win.
“Both of them despise playing by the rules, so it’s who will cheat first,” Kasparov told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “But in any game of wits, I would bet on Putin, unfortunately.”
For the past 10 months, Kasparov has watched Trump’s interactions with the Russian president, and he thinks Trump is playing exactly into what the Kremlin wants while apparently refusing to understand Putin’s goals.
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That’s a change from prior administrations. Kasparov argues that George W. Bush and Barack Obama got Putin wrong, and inadvertently helped the Russian president expand his power. But on some level, they also understood the strategic threat Putin posed—something he doesn’t think Trump grasps. “You can lose the war even if you have [an] overwhelming advantage—militarily, economically, technologically—if you don’t recognize you are at war,” Kasparov says.
Trump, Kasparov says, “operates in really a short-term environment. … [T]he way he communicates with the world definitely shows lack of any strategical calculations.”
Please, Kasparov says: Stop calling this chess.
“When I hear phrases like ‘Putin plays chess, Obama plays checkers,’ or moreover, ‘Trump plays chess,’ I feel I have my duty to defend the game that I have been playing for decades. The game of chess is game of strategy; of course, you have many opportunities to show your tactical skills, but foremost, it’s about strategy. And also, it’s a transparent game. It’s 100 percent transparency,” Kasparov says. “You know what I have; I know what you have. So, we don’t know the intentions of the opponent, but we know the resources our opponent can use to do us harm.”
In the 1980s, the half-Jewish, half-Armenian Kasparov won international celebrity after becoming, at 22, the youngest men’s world chess champion in history. Such prowess on the global stage made him a symbol of Soviet pride back home—the sport was an “important tool to demonstrate an intellectual superiority of the communist regime over decadent West,” Kasparov says—even as he personally came to detest the communist system. His love of chess fostered his awareness of politics: He began traveling internationally for chess matches at age 13, affording him the opportunity to “see the differences” between the USSR and capitalist countries. This political awakening made his status as a national hero all the more powerful, and he used that perch to voice support for the fight for reform and freedom in the Soviet Union throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s.
So concerned was Kasparov by Russia’s backslide into authoritarianism that, in 2008, he tried to run for president of Russia against Putin’s temporary presidential placeholder, Dmitri Medvedev, only to be barred from the ballot by the kind of technicality built in to block opposition leaders—the government’s stated rationale was that he hadn’t rented the right-size space to gather supporters—and ended up boycotting the election.
Now, from his home in New York, Kasparov watches Putin’s actions, frustrated by what he sees as the lack of chesslike geopolitical strategy from democratic forces. “We’ve yet to see political leaders who can think beyond their term in the office,” he says. “That’s what strategy means, because in democracy, you have continued [government]. A dictator doesn’t care what happens when he’s gone, so it’s all about survival.”
Click here to subscribe and listen to the full podcast to hear Kasparov’s take on why Putin likes having enemies instead of friends now, and whether he can beat the chess app on his phone.
Kasparov has never met Putin, but he was suspicious of him from Day One, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal warning about him shortly after President Boris Yeltsin surprised the world by picking his prime minister as his successor on New Year’s Eve 1999. Just being a KGB officer was reason enough to worry, Kasparov says, but that was compounded by all of Putin’s talk of what a catastrophe the fall of the USSR was, and then restoring the old Soviet national anthem.
Just like now, Kasparov says, Putin was emboldened by the rest of the world not having much of a response when he seized businesses, attacked the free press and had political opponents killed.
“The leaders of the free world pretended, or believed, that Putin could be a good partner,” Kasparov says. “Yes, maybe he did something that they wouldn’t approve in Russia, who cares? Because he could be someone to work with on the international arena.”
Kasparov said Putin worked over George W. Bush KGB-style, reading up on being a born-again Christian and tailor-making a story for him about being secretly baptized and wearing a hidden cross. With Obama, he made a big show of having to work out a deal on Syria, Kasparov said, but “there was no common ground, because even if Putin pretended that he wanted to help in Syria, it was all about just using an opportunity, and he was very good in grabbing every opportunity. The moment Obama created a vacuum, Putin grabbed it.”
The takeaway lesson for the world from Bashar Assad’s survival, in Kasparov’s estimation: “This, for Putin, is a demonstration that if you stick with me, I will protect you, even if the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, wants you out.”
Enter Trump. Kasparov says that unlike most people, he was able to watch the coverage in the American and Russian media side by side through the election and since. For the Russians, it was an obvious progression through the stages of people taking Trump seriously, starting out by saying Trump’s candidacy showed that all politics could be corrupt, then to saying that it spread chaos, then to saying he’d never win because the system was rigged even though he was a great guy.
“But then it was massive celebration, and you could read, sometimes between the lines, sometimes almost openly, preaching Trump as someone who would change everything in Russian relations,” Kasparov says. “I have no doubt that Putin’s dream was another big Crimea meeting, big Yalta to divide the world.”
November 20, 2017
Kasparov talks to Sophia the Robot | Web Summit in Lisbon | 2017
Garry Kasparov, Avast security ambassador and former world chess champion, and Ondrej Vlcek, Avast CTO & EVP, Consumer, have discussed the threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence (AI) at Web Summit 2017 in Lisbon. Addressing delegates at one of the world’s largest technology conferences, Kasparov and Vlcek talked about humanity’s deep-seated anxiety over powerful, disruptive tech like AI, and how we can use our increasingly intelligent machines to solve real-world problems.
Vlcek joined Avast as a software developer in 1995 and became chief developer in 2003. He has been a thought-leader of AI-based cybersecurity since its inception and leads the company’s AI initiatives.
Kasparov became the Avast Security Ambassador in 2016. Ever since his historic chess matches against the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and 1997, he has been fascinated by the opportunities of man-machine collaboration. As Avast Security Ambassador, Kasparov speaks about the pros and cons of future technologies while maintaining an optimistic view of how these technologies will improve our lives if we develop them while leaving ample room for human ingenuity, morality, and guidance.
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In his latest book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, Kasparov analyses in earnest the potential of human-machine collaboration. He recounts his famous chess matches against Deep Blue and presents his optimistic analysis of the tremendous promise of intelligent machines. In prominent reviews, Deep Thinking has been praised by DeepMind guru Demis Hassabis and tech critic Nicholas Carr.
About Garry Kasparov:
Garry Kasparov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963. He became the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985 and was the world’s top-rated player for 20 years, until he retired in 2005. His matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue popularized chess and machine intelligence in unprecedented ways. Kasparov became a pro-democracy leader in Russia and an outspoken defender of individual freedom around the world, a mission he continues as the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School, where his lectures focus on human-machine collaboration, and is on the executive board of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. Kasparov is a provocative speaker who appears frequently before business, academic, and political audiences to speak about decision-making, strategy, technology, and artificial intelligence. His influential writings on politics, cognition, and tech have appeared in dozens of major publications around the world. He has written two acclaimed series of chess books and the bestsellers How Life Imitates Chess on decision-making and Winter Is Coming on Russia and Vladimir Putin. His new book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, was released in May 2017. In 2016, he was named a Security Ambassador by Avast, where he discusses cybersecurity and the digital future. He lives in New York City with his wife Dasha and their two children.
About Avast:
Avast (www.avast.com), the global leader in digital security products, protects over 400 million people online. Avast offers products under the Avast and AVG brands that protect people from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. The company’s threat detection network is among the most advanced in the world, using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to detect and stop threats in real time. Avast digital security products for Mobile, PC or Mac are top-ranked and certified by VB100, AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, OPSWAT, ICSA Labs, West Coast Labs and others. Avast is backed by leading global private equity firms CVC Capital Partners and Summit Partners.
November 12, 2017
“Artificial Intelligence: Intelligent Machines, Smart Policies” | October 26th, 2017
There could be no better time for the OECD to address the issue of intelligent machines and human policies. AI is not science fiction, it is the present, and it will affect more aspects of our lives every day. Seen and unseen, intelligent machines and algorithms are performing more and more tasks, often with little or no human guidance at all.
Machines replacing human labour is not new
The good news is that this IS good news. Labour being taken over by machines is nothing less than the history of human civilization. What started with doing the work of farm animals and manual labour, to manufacturing and simple calculations, is now reaching into the service and white-collar professions. This is what progress has always looked like — technology takes jobs and disrupts industries before it creates new jobs and new opportunities we cannot even imagine.
Trust me, I speak from personal experience. I was perhaps the first knowledge worker to have my job threatened by a machine, when as the world chess champion, I faced the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue 20 years ago. I like to remind people that there were actually two Deep Blue matches, and that I won the first in 1996 before losing the more famous match in 1997. What can I say, I’m a sore loser!
But of course it was only a matter of time, and it was my blessing and curse to be the world champion when machines finally conquered what had been considered a holy grail of computation since the 1950s, when the legendary founding father of computer, Alan Turing, published the first chess program.
Losing was painful, but I realised that this was also a human achievement, a human victory. After all, humans designed and built Deep Blue, and humans would benefit from the knowledge they created. And in the big picture, that is what mattered more than who won or lost a chess match.
“The era of human PLUS intelligent machine could truly begin”.
Losing didn’t make me a pessimist about chess or technology. It made me an optimist. I realised that with the era of “human VERSUS machine” ending, the era of “human PLUS intelligent machine” could truly begin. Even the smartest algorithms and robots are tools, and we use our tools to expand our reach, our power, and our knowledge. Our goal must be to find new and better ways to enhance our abilities with these amazing machines.
Who is responsible for the actions of a robot?
As their power grows, so must human responsibility, and there we come to the second part of the title of this conference, “smart policies.” AI and increasingly autonomous machines lead to many vital questions. Who is responsible for the actions of a robot? How can human morality be reflected in our silicon creations? What will society look like if it’s wealthier, more productive, and safer, but without millions of human jobs?
We don’t know, but we cannot let that prevent us from going forward. We never know exactly how powerful new technology will change our lives and our societies. Artificial intelligence is not some new gadget. It will change everything, the way steam power or electricity did, the way the internet is altering our world in ways we never imagined.
If this sounds ominous instead of amazing, you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies about killer robots! In the past, our tools made us stronger and faster, capable of lifting mountains and rocketing into space. Our new tools will make us smarter, enabling us to better understand our world and ourselves.
“AI, just like all human technology, is agnostic. It can be used for good or evil”.
Deep Blue didn’t understand chess, or even know it was playing chess, but it played it very well. We may not comprehend all the rules our machines invent, or predict all the ways they will change our lives, but we will benefit from them nonetheless. Remember that AI, just like all human technology, is agnostic. It can be used for good or evil. The smartphone in everyone’s pocket is an incredible tool for education, communication, commerce, and entertainment. It can also be used to spread propaganda or build a terrorist network.
Better technology, smarter technology, does not change human nature. It empowers us, for better and for worse. That is why we must remember that creating better humans will always be more important than creating smarter machines.
Do not be afraid, because fear will only hold us back. I ask you to keep that in mind that trying to slow things down will only make it easier for our machines to surpass us. They will take over more and more routine tasks, so our goal must to keep creating new tasks that aren’t routine. And so, we must be ambitious, aim high into the unknown, so we have new jobs, new industries, that require uniquely human creativity. Our intelligent machines will help us achieve these dreams if we use them wisely.
Our real challenge is to keep thinking up new directions for artificial intelligence to explore—and that’s a job that can never be done by a machine.
November 3, 2017
October 9, 2017
September 28, 2017
Garry Kasparov: There’s No Shame in Losing to a Machine | Fortune.com | Sept 25, 2017
READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT FORTUNE.COM
by Garry Kasparov
Sep 25, 2017
I had the dubious honor of becoming the proverbial man in “man versus machine” when I faced the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue across the chessboard. When I lost our rematch in 1997, it was hailed by many as a momentous occasion for human technology, on par with the Wright brothers’ first flight or the moon landing. Of course, I didn’t feel so enthusiastic about it myself, but as I licked my wounds I realized that while the era of human versus intelligent machine was ending in chess, it was only getting started in every other aspect of our lives.
Deep Blue was conclusive proof that machines could surpass humans in complex cognitive tasks that we had long assumed were unique to our developed brains. Using chess as a metaphor, I discuss this important distinction in my recent book Deep Thinking. Deep Blue could look at 200 million positions per second, while I was limited to two or three, and yet we competed equally. The human brain is an unmatched analogy engine, finding useful patterns to leverage our lifetime of experience to make decisions.
Chess has strict rules and a clear goal—checkmate. It was ideal for the old model of smart machines: Humans program in the rules and some evaluation factors to improve the algorithms’ performance and the computer executes the code with such incredible speed that it produces superior results. But life—business, education, investing—doesn’t have such a tidy, deterministic framework. Now machine learning is pushing further across the frontier of what machines can do better than humans—and they have limitless potential.
Google Translate, for example, doesn’t know much about language at all. It doesn’t care about the rules of grammar every student of a second language must navigate. Instead, it uses astronomical amounts of real language examples to learn more like the way human infants learn a first language. It doesn’t care why a sentence is correct, and it keeps getting a tiny bit more accurate with every iteration.
As I recount in Deep Thinking, this is an old idea—even attempted with chess machines in the 1980s—but there wasn’t enough data or the ability to sift through it fast enough to make it useful. This year, the Google-backed DeepMind team, led by Demis Hassabis and their program AlphaGo, beat the world’s top player of Go, a game too complex for brute force methods. Among other techniques, AlphaGo played millions of games against itself to learn what worked best.
What is worthless with a few thousand examples can be very powerful with billions of them in our data-rich world of limitless cloud access. And while 90% accuracy isn’t good enough for a self-driving car, it’s a tremendous advance in areas like medical diagnosis, where machines are already becoming more accurate than human doctors. Think about all the fields where machines will be able to teach themselves, and us, new ways of solving problems based on what works best instead of centuries of accumulated human dogma. Machines even teach themselves better ways to learn, effectively coding themselves. This is a brave new world, one in which machines are doing things humans do not know how to teach them to do, one in which machines figure out the rules.
If this sounds ominous instead of amazing, you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies about killer robots. In the past, our tools made us stronger and faster, capable of lifting mountains and rocketing into space. Our new tools will make us smarter, enabling us to better understand our world and ourselves. Deep Blue didn’t understand chess, or even know it was playing chess, but it played it very well. We may not comprehend all the rules our machines invent, but we will benefit from them nonetheless. Our challenge is to keep thinking up new directions for artificial intelligence to explore—and that’s a job that can never be done by a machine.
Garry Kasparov is the author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, which was published in 2017.
Reviving the Rational Middle | Avast Blog | Sept 2017
How the most effective policy for security and stability is no policy at all.
In my previous blog posts, I have often argued that the internet brings latent conflicts to the fore, whether we are discussing fake news, government surveillance, nation-state cybersecurity or hate speech. Now, I’d like to make the case that it also works the other way, as we witness the opposite happen such as in Charlottesville, where white supremacist groups marched with lit torches. Tensions that have long been simmering online have now moved into the realm of face-to-face interaction, where they have exploded with fresh force. Difficult chapters of America’s history have resurfaced; viewpoints we would like to think have been eradicated are still very much alive. The episodes in Charlottesville were painful to watch, absolutely, but perhaps it is better to have these elements of society exposed. If they remain outside of the public’s awareness, we can continue to collectively deny their existence. If they are brought to the surface, we must confront them and react, hopefully in a way that aligns with our guiding principles.
One possible, and undesirable, outcome of this recent outpouring of animosity would be a push to legislate away hateful speech, online and off. Fascist groups don’t have broad enough public appeal to win major political battles. Leftist groups, on the other hand—and this includes the “antifa” movement that has attracted so much media attention in the past few weeks—are in a position to change the way we regulate hate speech in this country. It’s very possible that there will be anti-fascist legislation proposed, mimicking the hate-speech laws in Europe I discussed in my last post.
The problem with such legislation is that, while it may start out censoring a type of content that is unanimously viewed as deserving of censorship, these powers will inevitably be used against other types of expression. E.g.: politically incorrect language, criticism of government figures like politicians, military, or law enforcement, or even calls for government programs to be cut. The politicization and regulation of speech, even that which is most worthy of condemnation, must always be balanced against the dangers of expanding government’s reach. Tools created with good intentions today become the building blocks for abuse of power, repression, threats to security and persecution tomorrow. And, as I’ve written in the past, power given to the government is nearly impossible to get back.
I would also present another question we should ask ourselves: would it really be a victory to banish hate speech from the open expanses of the internet? If we were to succeed in doing so, the proponents of fringe views would simply move into darker corners where they cannot be policed, which has already happened in the case of twomajor far-right websites in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Once they are pushed to the dark web, they fall beneath the public’s radar, and only committed followers have access to their content. While our sensibilities are shielded, the profound social divisions and discontent they point to are swept under the rug.
The ideology of white nationalist groups may be utterly repugnant and devoid of positive solutions to move society forward, but their radicalism is often a sign of a larger cultural breakdown. More people harbor those beliefs than anyone realized, or wanted to admit. When hundreds of neo-Nazis took to the streets, their presence became inescapable and quickly forced every major political figure in the country to take a stand, which is a positive result. Individuals used their personal social media accounts to denounce racism and all forms of discrimination, another positive. That is a useful exercise in raising awareness about topics that are rarely discussed. While it has been a painful ordeal, I believe it can be a catalyst, as with Trump’s entire presidency, one that helps Americans reaffirm the national desire to draw strength, rather than hostility, from diversity.
In this world of increasingly extreme extremes, we ought to remember that stability and security come from finding the middle ground and embracing compromise. But in recent decades, American politics has been dominated by drastic swings from left to right, with each side finding its identity in accusation of the other. We have become accustomed to a mentality of blame, swiftly assigning responsibilities for all the ills we encounter to those with whom we disagree. It is dangerously easy to think that the solution lies in simply suppressing the viewpoints we find abhorrent, but—as my personal experience living under a Communist regime proved to me—these fixes are short-term at best. All they ensure is a greater concentration of power in the hands of the government, power that will be used to advance a series of contradictory agendas as power flows from one group to the next.
The Kremlin’s army of bots promotes material from the American far left and Bernie Sanders, not just their loyal partner in the White House. Putin wants to promote the chaos and division that lead to weakness in his rivals on the international stage. His goal is not necessarily to advance one side or the other, but to strengthen the extreme ends of the spectrum. This weakens the rational middle, which has been the characteristic strength of American politics in the past and desperately needs to be revived. When citizens and legislators become more tolerant of differences—not agreeing with them, but acknowledging their right to expression—a space for effective policymaking opens up. And remember that sometimes the most effective policy is no policy at all, and what is needed is common sense, public debate, and consistent enforcement of existing laws, not giving more power to the government.
The goal should not be stopgap measures to silence one group or prop up another, but long-term frameworks that strengthen the traditions of liberty and bolster democratic values in a way that will persist from one administration and generation to the next. We must make sure that the conversations sparked by Charlottesville do not descend into a dead-end of recrimination and instead look to the future—using the awareness these incidents have raised to elevate our political discourse and seek a more productive common ground.
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